BSS: The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) fears extreme climate events exposed danger to Bangladesh’s food production, identifying cyclones as a major crop loss factor alongside draughts and floods, as the UN body came up with its annual report on food security.
“In Bangladesh cyclones cause increased salinity from seawater to coastal and freshwater fishery communities, negatively affecting food production due to insufficient access to freshwater,” read the latest FAO report on the state of global food security released last week.
The FAO’s State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018 report said it found the prevalence and number of undernourished people tend to be higher in countries like Bangladesh and they were “highly exposed to climate extremes”.
“Undernourishment is higher again when exposure to climate extremes is compounded by a high roportion of the population depending on agricultural systems that are highly sensitive to rainfall and temperature variability,” the report said.