Brussels/Rome - Halting deforestation is essential for ending hunger, addressing the climate crisis and ensuring the livelihoods of rural and indigenous communities, while sustaining wildlife and biodiversity. This requires a combination of political will, policy coherence, appropriate funding and wide stakeholder engagement, according to the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), QU Dongyu.
"We must promote win-win solutions for increased sustainable production, while halting deforestation," Qu told a high-level meeting in Brussels today jointly organized by FAO and the French Presidency of the Council of the European Union.
For decades, deforestation has resulted from a conversion of forests into agricultural land. This competition for land has multiple causes, including population growth, income levels, food consumption and trade patterns, insecure land tenure and ineffective land use governance.
Many of these factors also affect food security and nutrition.
"We must address trade-offs and maximize synergies between agrifood systems and forests to truly meet the challenge of producing sufficient, safe and healthy food for a growing population, while conserving our natural resources and biodiversity," Qu said.
Transforming our agrifood systems to make them more efficient, more inclusive, more resilient and more sustainable needs increased political, financial and technical investments, Qu said.
While market-based solutions are gaining in importance, they must be coupled with actions designed to support the weakest players of the targeted supply chains. This requires empowering and incentivizing smallholders, Indigenous Peoples and local communities. These communities manage nearly half of forest and farmlands worldwide, so their involvement is fundamental, Qu said.
The event in Brussels, entitled "Forests for livelihoods, climate and biodiversity: solution pathways to halt deforestation," also saw interventions by, among others, French Agriculture Minister Julien Denormandie, whose country currently holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU.
"Fighting deforestation with determination, at a global level, is an objective we all share with an urgency of which we are all aware. We must act now and we need to act fast," Denormandie said. "We want to act together to improve the sustainability of value chains and create, through reciprocal norms, collective conditions for the benefit of all, for the climate, health and biodiversity, without losing sight of the food security objective," Denormandie added.
Maintaining momentum
The event was designed to maintain high-level momentum on halting deforestation and fostering sustainable land management, presenting best-case practices from different regions.
It follows the Strategic Dialogue held in May 2021 between FAO and the EU, which considered forests an integral part of agreed priorities reflected in five thematic areas: i) food systems and One Health; ii) climate change, biodiversity, and natural resources; iii) food crises, food security and resilient livelihoods; iv) sustainable agrifood value chain investments and policies; and v) agrifood systems transformation through digitalization.
This shared vision on priorities and responses between the EU and FAO builds on long-standing partnerships and programmes, including the UN-REDD Programme, FAO-EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Programme, the Sustainable Wildlife Management Programme and the Action Against Desertification programme in support of the Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel initiative and South-South Cooperation.
