A key goal of the United Nations since its conception has been the promotion of stability, equality, and development amongst member states. One important aspect of this mission is ensuring people can feed themselves; development can come only from environments where people can meet their basic needs. 

Many places lack the infrastructure and institutional capacity needed to be able to stably supply food and agricultural products needed for people to feed themselves. Shipments of food require dry and sometimes chilled environments where food will not spoil. Logistical centers in developing areas might be affected by dry-wet seasonal differences, energy insecurity, or simply a lack of capacity due to the expense of maintaining and staffing such centers. Additionally, infrastructure connecting these logistics centers to the areas requiring food can be inconsistent, underfunded, or insufficient in scale to provide the capacity of food needed for stable growth. This committee will discuss national and international policies and programs that support countries in developing appropriate infrastructure to make transporting food efficient and safe.

Additionally, food production is a very water-intensive process. Historically, agriculture was performed ‘extensively’ rather than ‘intensively’, which meant that vast fields were used across areas where agriculture could be maintained sustainably. In the modern day, technological and economic considerations result in the prioritization of intensive agriculture which relies on vast irrigation and synthetic fertilizer use to produce tremendous amounts of food at the cost of highly localized and often inefficient resource use. Soil becomes exhausted resulting in elevated and less efficient use of fertilizer. This is especially true in meat production. The use of resources is a major consideration when expanding food production from a logistical, economic, and environmental perspective. Many countries do not have the industrial capacity to produce the chemicals and tools necessary for modern agriculture, and even within countries, those who produce and own agricultural equipment are often not the people who need to use and live off of that equipment. This committee will discuss national and international approaches to reducing resources–especially water–usage and waste in food production as well as ways of producing food more sustainably and equitably.

Please note this is a double delegation committee.

The Dais