International Workshop on “Applications of Juncao Technology and its contribution to alleviating poverty, promoting employment and protecting the environment”
Tue 20 Feb 2024, 8.00 am — Fri 23 Feb 2024, 6.00 pmRelated
Background
According to the United Nations Food Systems Summit that was held in 2021, many of the world’s food systems are fragile and not fulfilling the right to adequate food for all. Hunger and malnutrition are on the rise again. According to FAO’s “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023”, between 691 and 783 million people faced hunger in 2022. This represents an increase of 122 million people compared to 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. This increase is attributed to the pandemic and repeated weather shocks and conflicts, including the war in Ukraine, by the cost-of-living crisis, poverty and high levels of inequality. If trends remain as they are, the Sustainable Development Goal of ending hunger by 2030 will not be reached. The number of people facing hunger increased in Western Asia, the Caribbean and Africa in 2022.
The 2030 Agenda recognizes that capacity-building forms part of the means of implementation for the SDGs (paragraph 41). Each SDG contains targets relating to means of implementation, including capacity- building. Moreover, SDG 17, which covers means of implementation and the global partnership for sustainable development, contains target 17.9 which aims to: “Enhance international support for implementing effective and targeted capacity-building in developing countries to support national plans to implement all the sustainable development goals, including through North-South, South-South and triangular cooperation”. The High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) that has the central role in overseeing follow up and review in implementing the Goals and targets at the global level has also underlined and reiterated the importance of supporting developing countries in their efforts to implement the SDGs and advance the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
In that regard, UNDESA collaborated with the National Engineering Research Centre for Juncao Technology of the Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University (FAFU) of the People’s Republic of China, under the UN Peace and Development Trust Fund, on a project entitled “Enhancing capacity of developing countries to achieve sustainable agriculture through the transfer of Juncao technology for alleviating poverty and promoting productive employment”. This project is linked to the imperative to get back on track and accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goal, in particular goals related to the eradication of poverty, reduction of hunger, use of renewable energy, employment creation, empowerment of women and youth, protection of the environment and to climate change adaptation and mitigation.
The UN Food Systems Summit recognized the imperative to transform agri-food systems. Such transformation depends on scaling up investments in agriculture, technological transfer, building capacities of smallholder farmers, and the empowerment of women and youth. For instance, in sub-Saharan Africa, 60 per cent of working women are in agriculture and lack equal access to assets and resources such as land, seeds, fertilizer, finance, and appropriate technologies that are essential to agri-food systems and the achievement of the SDGs. To address some of these challenges, especially closing the technological gap in agriculture and boosting the contribution of agriculture to ending extreme poverty and hunger, and to shared prosperity, UNDESA and FAFU are promoting the transfer of Juncao technology to developing countries.
Announcements
Public Information
Presentations
Key documents
Additional Resources
Capacity Development
Multi-stakeholder partnerships
Food security and nutrition and sustainable agriculture
