Food Security: Future Livestock Policy and Planning

Abstract

Food security is when all people always have physical and economic access to buy, produce, obtain or consume sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for a healthy and active life. Consistent with the theme of this conference (Veterinarians as Essential Health Workers for National Resilience and Security), this presentation will focus only on elements of food security that are closely related to animal production and disease. Within this specific context, food security in Indonesia faces a range of threats over the next 20 years. These threats include climate change (including increasing extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, and fires), pest and disease outbreaks (including zoonoses and emerging infectious diseases), infrastructure limitations affecting plant and animal production, land and water resource scarcity in some areas, human population growth with an associated increase in demand for food and an aging farmer population. Many of these threats are interconnected. This presentation will detail some of the interrelationships between these various threats and briefly highlight some of the critical challenges. A case will be presented that futures focused livestock policy and planning that takes a longer time frame into account will assist in developing more robust and resilient options to frame these challenges and support food security. Decision-makers will face the difficult task of weighing up numerous competing demands and will need to accept that trade-offs will be inevitable. Such decisions create tensions between various stakeholders as they seek to find a path to a ‘preferred future’ for all. Ideally, these tensions should be explicitly recognised and addressed by a wide range of stakeholders including veterinarians.