FOOD AND WATER
FOOD AND WATER, THE INSEPARABLE TWINS
The agriculture and water and sanitation sectors are intertwined, as are the challenges to delivering
their respective SDGs on time By Julia Zacharenkova and Nicholas K. Smith, OPEC Fund
“W e do want global goals and there is a strong advantage with that to communicate and rally behind it and advocate,” said the UN’s Joakim Harlin. “But the problem with global goals is we aggregate and it masks a lot of disparities and the goals might not then be relevant for all countries.” This remark might sound like a critique of the midpoint progress of the UN SDGs, which aim for a 2030 completion. However, Harlin gave this statement in an interview in 2012. At the time, he was a senior water resources advisor for UNDP and was speaking with UN-Water, an interagency that coordinates international work on water and sanitation, about the sector’s important role in the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, better known as Rio+20. In 2012, hopes were high for the conference’s two main themes: building a green economy and improving international coordination. “The water issues are super important,” Harlin had said. “But if we look specifically what’s lagging behind now in terms of reaching goals and the
links to hygiene and health, sanitation is one of those areas that is lagging most behind.” Those words might apply to 2012, but they are also eerily prescient in 2023 and the state of all the SDGs linked to water. The Water-Energy-Food Nexus No one is really ranking the importance of one SDG above another, but one thing is clear to anyone with even a passing interest in the global goals: you cannot
build a sustainable future for all without adequate food and water. No two sectors are quite as linked as SDG 2 – Zero Hunger and SDG 6 – Clean Water and Sanitation. You cannot
We are facing an unprecedented global food crisis and all signs suggest we have not yet seen the worst.
David Beasley, World Food Programme, October 2022
PHOTOS: Eskinder Debebe / United Nations Photo; (above, centre right): Jeffrey Michael Walcott
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