The challenges we face are considerable: from rethinking our relationship with the environment, and the wide-reaching implications this has, to tackling the persistent inequalities and injustices that characterise our relationships with each other. The WFC has identified 24 key issues that it will seek to address. With each campaign the WFC will highlight the connections between these areas, and aim to integrate them into its policy recommendations.The global challenges can be roughly grouped into three categories:
Global Challenges
Environment
The key global challenges grouped together in this category concern our relationship with the planet that supports us. With limited natural resources, an increasingly urbanised and ever-growing population, and the looming threat of irreversible climate change, the need to reconsider the way we interact with our environment has never been more pressing. Paramount to this is the acknowledgement that we are a part of the global ecosystem and not its rulers.
Social Issues
The key global challenges grouped together in this category are concerned with ensuring that people across the world can lead healthy and fulfilled lives. This involves embracing the diversity of human traits and capabilities, and acknowledging that we are all equal and yet distinct.
Economics and Politics
The key global challenges grouped together in this category are concerned with the organisation of human societies and the relationships between them. This involves fair and peaceful exchange, and an equitable distribution of costs and benefits in the creation of global welfare.
Healthy Food for All
UN figures show that global food supplies are more than adequate, producing 1.5 times the amount required to feed the world. But desertification and soil erosion are rapidly decreasing the available arable land. Alternative food production systems need greater credence. Permaculture cultivation produces more energy than it consumes, and is operational in many countries. Domestication of edible wild perennials can increase per-acre yields and may herald a new agricultural revolution.
Why are we allowing 35,000 people to die of starvation every day and how can the human right to nourishing food be implemented? Is a reduction of global meat production necessary? How can pesticide poisoning of some 25 million people a year be prevented? Can organic farming feed the world? What are the pros and cons of subsidized large-scale agribusiness? What are the best ways to reform it? Can we develop a new social contract between society and agriculture, assuring sustainable yields and healthy food from efficiently farmed land?