In 2015, world leaders of 193 member states of the United Nations agreed to 17 global goals, officially known as the Sustainable Development Goals and pronounced SDGs.

These goals were carefully identified as having the potential to change the world by 2030 through poverty eradication, fighting inequality and addressing the urgency of climate change.

The 17 goals constitute of 169 targets and 230 indicators.

The global goals are ambitious but achievable.

It integrates all three aspects of sustainable development and they are social, economic and environmental.

Goal 2 – Zero Hunger

Goal 2 is to end hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.

There are eight targets in Goal 2.

Extreme hunger and malnutrition remain a barrier to sustainable development.

It creates a trap that people cannot easily escape from.

Hunger and malnutrition mean less productive individuals who are more prone to disease and thus often unable to earn more and improve their livelihoods thereby they are stuck in the poverty bracket.

Before COVID-19, food insecurity was already on the rise.

In a recently published brief by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, today more than 820 million people regularly go to bed hungry.

135 million of that population suffer from acute hunger largely due to man-made conflicts, climate change and economic downturns.

An estimated 821 million people were undernourished in 2017, the same number as in 2010.

The prevalence of undernutrition has remained virtually unchanged in the past three years.

Majority of the world's hungry people live in developing countries.

With a hunger prevalence rate of 23.2% in 2017, the sub-Saharan Africa region has the highest prevalence of hunger.

Africans are easily pushed into food insecurity because their ability to adapt is limited by many factors such as low savings, access to finance and insurance.

As a result, lives are lost, malnutrition rises, health worsens and school enrollment drops.

All this ultimately damages the economy's productive capacity.

These challenges are currently playing out with COVID-19.

Future landscape.

What is the way forward?

This year, Africa is dealing with an unusual low-cost infestation that's ravaging parts of the Horn of Africa.

A World Bank report states that this outbreak could result in crop and livestock losses valued at $8.5 billion and also reduced harvests and shortage of food in markets.

The same report adds that climate shocks, which have been increasing in number and severity in recent years, could also hurt agricultural production.

These multiple crises unfolding at the same time threaten to grow the rate of Africa's hungry and vulnerable people.

It also concludes that refugees, internally displaced people and people living in areas marked by conflict and fragility like the Sahel are especially at risk.

COVID-19 heightens the severity of the difficulty of the struggle to ensure food security.

There is a strong link between poverty and food insecurity.

Investment in the agriculture sector is critical in reducing hunger and improving food security.

Small-scale food producers are a big part of the solution to world hunger.

Empowering small-scale food producers is central to improving food security and reducing poverty and hunger.

Specifically, attention needs to be given to increasing the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers, implementing resilient agricultural practices and ensuring the proper functioning of markets.

Finally, in ensuring that no one is left behind on the road towards zero hunger, the intergenerational cycle of malnutrition must be broken.

Africa cannot address food insecurity without addressing the agriculture-related drivers of conflict and fragility and their consequences.

Investing in smallholder women and men is an important way to increase food security and nutrition for the poorest, as well as food production for local and global markets.

If women farmers had the same access to resources as men, the number of hungry in the world could be reduced by up to 150 million.

UNC's faculty and research support this goal.

Professors Colin Torr-West,

Anthropology Department at UNC, and Aaron Moody, Geography Department at UNC, are working with a team of undergraduate and graduate students to understand vegetation dynamics in the Sahelian region of Burkina Faso in West Africa.

This project is also supported by UNC's research hub and the GIS librarian Philip McDaniel.

This National Science Foundation-funded project is titled

Factors Influencing Vegetation Trends in Dryland Zones and it contributes directly to Goal 2's targets 2.3 and 2.4.

Factors Influencing Vegetation Trends in Dryland Zones

The Sahelian region has long been considered an area of increasing desertification since droughts of the 1970s and 1980s.

But recent analysis of satellite images suggests the opposite, revealing patterns of increased vegetation called re-greening.

One big question around this process of re-greening is what is causing it?

Over the summer of 2019,

Colin Torr-West and graduate students

Alfredo Rojas, Anthropology Department at UNC, and Kofi Nomedji, Anthropology Department at Duke, conducted fieldwork in farming communities to understand what and who is contributing to re-greening.

Local communities are practicing soil and water conservation strategies to improve the quality of soil.

SWC practices help nourish the soil, leading to the growth of crops, as well as increased tree cover.

Fieldwork included participatory mapping activities to tap into community insights of local vegetation patterns.

Since the summer,

Colin West and students have been analyzing fieldwork data to create web maps as well as interpret satellite imagery through the perspectives of local community members.

Data is still being analyzed, but some preliminary findings suggest that

SWC practices contribute to greening.

And greening appears to be patchy throughout the communities where fieldwork was done.

Progress on this research has been slightly affected by COVID-19.

The research team is currently working on articles to publish results in Anthropology and Geography journals.

In conclusion, increasing agricultural productivity and sustainable food production are crucial to help alleviate the perils of hunger.

Investment in the agriculture sector is critical for reducing hunger and poverty, improving food security, creating employment and building resilience to disasters and shocks.

Despite the challenges of climate change and state fragility in parts of Africa, the continent has the potential to not only achieve food and nutrition security, but to leverage the food sector for its overall development.

For the goals to be met, everyone needs to do their part.

Academic and research institutions, governments, the private sector, civil society, bilateral and multilateral institutions, the development community, and the general public.