10^th Global Food Security Food Safety and Sustainability

Food security and the Sustainable Development Goals: Synergies, Tensions and Trade-offs

<p justify;"="" style="text-align: justify;">Sustainable Development Goal 2 - Zero Hunger- is one of the 17 SDGs. It aims to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture by 2030. Though the 17 SDGs together are required for holistic sustainable development, many of them could result in some unintended, negative consequences or some missed synergies with other SDGs when implemented in isolation. For example, several of the targets of SDG 2 have potential for both tradeoffs and synergies with the impact on ecosystems (SDG 15) and water (SDG 6). Others, such as increasing income through doubling agricultural production are often considered synergies with improved human nutrition but evidence does not always support this assumption. As a consequence, action towards SDG2 may be considered to leverage the whole Agenda 2030 under certain conditions. Achieving Zero Hunger and its sub goals of food security, increased nutrition and sustainable agriculture, thus needs systems thinking and implementation. This conference theme addresses examples of the types of tradeoffs and synergies that are likely to occur and how to handle these to guide a holistic implementation of the SDGs.