{"id":2540,"date":"2019-05-22T08:59:27","date_gmt":"2019-05-22T08:59:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/africasustainabilitymatters.com\/?p=2540"},"modified":"2026-01-11T05:30:18","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T05:30:18","slug":"stop-soil-erosion-now-or-face-starvation-soon-scientists-warn-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/2019\/05\/22\/stop-soil-erosion-now-or-face-starvation-soon-scientists-warn-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Species Extinction Not Just A Curiosity: Our Food Security And Health Are At Stake"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>By UN Environment<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">While restaurants in\ncities around the world offer a tremendous variety of dishes, our global diet\nas a whole\u2014what people actually eat\u2014is becoming more homogenized. Rice, one the\nworld\u2019s top staple foods, vividly illustrates this paradox: of the 90,000 varieties\nof rice stored in gene banks, only 40,000 are being cultivated, and perhaps no\nmore than a dozen can be found on your regular supermarket shelf.\n&nbsp;Combined with high-yield, intensive agriculture,\nthe\nchoices are bound to drastically decline over time. This is worrying from the\npoint of view of sustainability, food security, biodiversity and health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Our food systems,\nnutrition, health,&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/worldenvironmentday.global\/\">clean air<\/a>, climate, and\nfreshwater depend on biodiversity and healthy ecosystems\u2014an interdependent web\nof animal, plant, fungal and bacterial life. For instance, without\npollinators\u2014insects, birds and other animals who are pushed out of agricultural\nlands through the use of pesticides and insecticides\u2014many of the foods we know\nand love would disappear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And as a recent&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.unenvironment.org\/news-and-stories\/press-release\/natures-dangerous-decline-unprecedented-species-extinction-rates\">report<\/a>&nbsp;by the\nIntergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem\nServices (IPBES) shows, the human impact on the natural world is accelerating:\nentire populations of species are being lost faster than ever before\u2014one\nmillion species are being driven to extinction,&nbsp;the report says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Read <a href=\"https:\/\/www.unenvironment.org\/news-and-stories\/story\/species-extinction-not-just-curiosity-our-food-security-and-health-are-stake\">full story<\/a> in the UN Environment<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By UN Environment While restaurants in cities around the world offer a tremendous variety of dishes, our global diet as a whole\u2014what people actually eat\u2014is becoming more homogenized. Rice, one&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2562,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}