FAISALABAD City News

‘Natural disasters, land degradation
aggravating food insecurity’
From Our Correspondent
FAISALABAD: Natural disasters, land degradation, water and changing climate issue, low productivity and new diseases are aggravating the food insecurity. This was said by speakers on the second day of an eight-day International Centre for Development and Decent Work (ICDD) PhD workshop at the University of Agriculture Faisalabad.
Speaking on the occasion, Dr Andreas Burkert from the University of Kassel, Germany, called for making collaborated efforts on the part of all stakeholders to combat the food insecurity issue. He urged the scientists to come up with innovative ideas to address the issue. He said that interdisciplinary knowledge generation was the need of hour to face the emerging issues in the world. He said that the ICDD had kicked off the second phase from 2015/19. It was focusing on five core research topics, including decent work along agricultural values chains, organising informal economy, rural welfare, rural urban linkages, livestock and social protection and rethinking development cooperation, he added.
Dr Christoph Scherrer from the University of Kassel said that the rural-urban linkages were vital to reduce poverty. He said that the rural population was the worst affected by the poverty. He said that the ICDD being the international multidisciplinary network of universities from four continents including Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe, was intensively working on increasing income opportunities for rural and urban population of the developing countries. Dr Asif Ali said that 570 million people were living below the poverty line in Asia. Dr Izhar Ahmad and others also spoke on the occasion.