Elechi Jasper Okoro Godwin

By Jasper Okoro Godwin Elechi, Ikechukwu U. Nwiyi and Cornelius Smah Adamu

Our world is incredibly diverse and beautiful, everything we do has an impact on the environment, and our actions are intertwined. Recognizing how our actions affect the Earth on a global scale means, we need to change the way we do things. We must ensure that the value society derives from our actions comes at a low cost to the environment. A sustainable strategy to establish a resilient food system is to ensure that human demand for the Earth’s resources for food is kept within the supply of these resources. While more than 800 million people worldwide suffer from chronic malnutrition, our food systems emit roughly a third of all greenhouse emissions. Also, over 80% of our biodiversity gets lost. Hence, scaling up food system is simply not an option to feed nine to ten billion people by 2050 as we will need to produce more food in the next four decades than all of history’s farmers have harvested in the last eight thousand years. Therefore, rather than upscaling, the global food systems require transformation. Four critical aspects of this transformation include: “Boosting the small; Transforming the Big; Losing Less; and Eating Smarter.” Examining these four areas more deeply, it becomes evident that, while new technology will be critical to the transformation, government involvement, as well as better financial and behavioral change from residents and consumers, will be required. This chapter focuses on these four pillars that make up the global food system transformation for resilience.

Part of the book: Food Systems Resilience

By Elechi Jasper Okoro Godwin, Vidhya Chandrasekaran, Adamu Cornelius Smah and Ekoja Omeyi Faith

The zoonotic potential of foodborne infections, as well as their capacity to secrete toxins that cause a threat to global food safety and nutrition security and is enough to highlight the gravity of the problem. Feeding the estimated world population of 8.4–8.7 billion, 9.4–10.2 billion, and 11 billion people by 2030, 2050, and 2100, respectively, will require significant increases in crop and animal production, which will increase the agricultural use of antibiotics, water and pesticides and fertilisers, and contact between humans, wild and domestic animals, all of which will have implications for the emergence and spread of infectious agents. Hence, Infectious foodborne zoonotic illnesses are spreading at an unprecedented rate over the world. The evidence that animals are carriers of foodborne diseases is examined in this chapter. The processes through which infectious foodborne zoonosis impacts the global food and nutrition security, as well as how human infectious illnesses may affect food production and distribution are synthesised. The need for agricultural and disease management and policy activities, as well as a review of recent research on novel detection and control techniques in addressing the public health threat posed by foodborne Zoonotic illness, is also addressed.

Part of the book: Foodborne Pathogens