If Africa’s farmers fail to adapt to a hotter world, we all fail
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There’s perhaps no greater area where this recognition plays out than on Africa’s farms and in its forests. Our vast expanses of nature — and the millions of smallholder farmers and entrepreneurs who rely on them — are vital to lifting people out of poverty, solving hunger, and storing carbon to fight climate change.
Yet today our food and land use systems are facing a crisis: over 280 million African people – one in five people on the continent – face chronic hunger. Nearly 20 percent of our land is degraded. And smallholder farmers, who produce 80 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s food, are at risk as droughts and floods destroy their crops. If they fail, we all fail.
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Simply put, there is no pathway to reaching a world in which global warming is limited to 1.5C, feeding a projected 9.7 billion people by 2050, and safeguarding nature without changing how we produce, distribute, and consume food and use our land.
The current crisis has been brewing for decades. Year after year, the value lost from grain alone due to post-harvest losses comes in at $4 billion. For context, that is more than the total value of food aid sub-Saharan Africa received in the past decade. The amount of grain that has been lost can feed up to 48 million people.
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