CLIMATE CHANGE AND FOOD SAFETY
Expo 2015, with its motto “Feeding the Planet, Energy for the life’, wants to raise awareness about two key issues: climate change and food safety.
Climate change and food safety are tightly interconnected.
For if on one side the increasing demand of food is at the origin of climatic change, on the other side the consequences of climate change are at the origin of the lack of food for some people.
But what climate change and food safety exactly are?
The climate change consists in the increase, in intensity and frequency, of natural disasters (hurricanes, storms, floods, drought, etc.), the increase of the level of the seas, desertification and loss of biodiversity.
It has been proved that these alterations of the climate are consequences of the human actions.
In particular activities such as the combustion of fossil fuels and the deforestation of the tropical forests have increased the concentration of the greenhouse in the atmosphere bringing to a general increase of the temperatures.
The increase of the temperature is at the origin of the climatic change.
Therefore we are all required to cooperate in the reduction of the concentration of the greenhouse gases reducing the activities that are at their root.
Some of these harmful activities are the ones connected to the agri-food production.
Food safety affirms the principle according to which all the people must have physical, social and economic access to adequate, sure and nourishing food.
Today we face the contradiction of a world where a part of the population doesn’t have access to the food and suffers from malnutrition while the other one has access to too much food and struggles with obesity.
It’s necessary, therefore, to rebalance the situation keeping in mind that to find effective solutions we need a synergy between the environmental protection policies and the agricultural and rural development ones.
