Mahatma Gandhi once said that “The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed.” This ominous quote continues to stay relevant even today, as the governments globally struggle to feed its people, with the world population projected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050.
Post World war II, the world embraced modern agriculture to meet the ever growing need for food, fodder and fuel. This involved use of modern machinery, technological developments, high use of agrochemicals viz pesticides and fertilizers, selective breeding and genetic modification to name a few. The modern agriculture helped to meet our requirements but also contributed to serious ecological and environmental damage viz. contribution to climate change, biodiversity loss, depletion of clean water resources, antibiotic resistance, and other forms agricultural pollution.
The Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG 2) to “End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture” (SDG2) encompasses addressing climate change, ensuring healthy lifestyles, empowering small farmers, advancing gender equality, ending rural poverty, and supporting sustainable agriculture.
Sustainable agriculture is an agricultural system that aims to fulfill the needs of the present human population while conserving the planet’s ability to sustain future generations. It uses methods like organic farming, crop rotation, agroforestry, rainwater harvesting with the aim to maintain the health of the ecosystem, earn profit and promote socioeconomic fairness.
In order to ensure that everyone has access to wholesome food, sustainable agriculture can play a crucial role in managing natural resources in a way that preserves ecosystem balance and meets present and future human needs. Building resilience of local food systems will be critical to averting large-scale future shortages and to ensuring food security and good nutrition for all. Eradicating poverty and hunger are integrally linked to boosting food production, agricultural productivity and rural incomes.
Sustainable agricultural practices and food systems, including both production and consumption, must be pursued from a holistic and integrated perspective. An increase in integrated decision-making processes at national and regional levels are needed to adequately synergise and address trade-offs among agriculture, water, energy, land and climate change.
Around the world, the Supreme Audit Institutions are collaborating and innovating to support their governments in incorporating sustainable agriculture and food security into national development plans and in evaluating the progress being achieved in the interlinked areas of poverty alleviation, gender equality, and climate change.
The audit findings can help the policymakers, administrators, philanthropists to improve the sustainability of food systems everywhere as well as advocating for policy and regulatory reforms to improve the efficiency and integration of domestic food markets by judicious use of public funds.
I am grateful to General Chanathap Indamra, Chairman of ASOSAI and Mr Hou Kai, Secretary-General of ASOSAI, for their motivational messages. I thank SAIs of China, Egypt, Indonesia and Kuwait for contributing articles for this issue of the journal. I am indebted to the contributors for enlightening us on ways to promote sustainable agriculture and food security by sharing the audit processes of their SAIs. I shall also reiterate my request here to actively follow our Twitter handle-@AsosaiJournal for accessing the articles published in the journal.