We are playing with our future and this has to change

Although all the focus is rightly on the coronavirus pandemic at the moment, we should not disregard our long-term challenges.

Food production and food security are crucial for our future. As societies, we should know more and pay far more attention. The bad news is that if we continue to mistreat and abuse the environment, and if the temperatures continue to rise as a result, the consequences are likely to be unimaginably dire.

Climate change is all too real, and it has a profound impact on food production and security. Experts agree that “the rise in global temperatures, linked to increasing pressures on fertile soil, risked jeopardizing food security for the planet”.

We must take such warnings very seriously. And we must act, the sooner the better.

We are calling on everyone, individuals and organisations, to put pressure on governments and other powers to make food security a priority. We need lobbying, negotiation and even compulsion; anything that works before one day it inevitably becomes too late.

Governments and other powerful players will have hopefully learned important lessons from the coronavirus pandemic. We need to work together, not purely out of altruistic idealism (however welcome it may be), but because it is in our vital mutual interest. Nobody is immune to global crises and we genuinely have to start thinking about our long-term future and survival.