Chapter 18: Aligning Food Security with SDGs and Climate Commitments: Food security policies and SDGs

The food security of developing economies is at a crossroads. Millions of people still experience hunger and malnutrition even though agricultural production is aggravated by climate change. The increasing temperatures, erratic rainfall, droughts, and floods endanger crop yields, soil quality, and livelihoods. In the meantime, agriculture is also a significant source of greenhouse gases, and food systems are both victims and contributors to climate change in a complex cycle. These two problems require radical, composite, and future-looking policies. This chapter addresses the multidimensional nature of food security through the four pillars of food security: availability, access, utilization, stability, and socioeconomic and institutional environments that lead to results in the developing world. It emphasizes the importance of international mechanisms, such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement, in finding the right balance between national policies, climate obligations, and development priorities. This correspondence is reflected in the creation of new strategies. As ways to create resilient, productive, and low-carbon food systems, climate-smart agriculture, agroforestry, sustainable land and water management, biodiversity conservation, and food loss and waste reduction are discussed. The potential of scientific and technological innovations, such as precision farming or crop varieties that are resistant to unfavorable climate conditions and digital solutions, has never been as high as it is now, to transform agricultural activities. This is also essential in the face of inclusive and sustainable socioeconomic and institutional interventions such as policy integration, capacity building among farmers, gender equity and value chains. The chapter combines climate adaptation, mitigation, and food security to give a roadmap on how the developing economies can develop resilient and equitable food systems. It focuses on evidence-based, practical policy solutions and strategies that will assist in maximizing the synergies, reducing trade-offs, and empowering communities. Harmonizing food security and climate action has thus become an imperative rather than an option, requiring coherent, cross-sectoral policies that safeguard food availability, livelihoods, and environmental sustainability for present and future generations.