The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released a new report yesterday, warning that the ecological foundations supporting food security are under threat. The UNEP report ‘Avoiding Future Famines’ was written by 12 leading experts involved in world food systems. The authors found that agriculture is facing multiple threats, including competition for water, deforestation and conventional agricultural practices. The report went on to illustrate how these threats are being exacerbated by population growth and the changing of lifestyles and diets. “The era of seemingly ever-lasting production based upon maximizing inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides, mining supplies of freshwater and fertile arable land and advancements linked to mechanisation are hitting their limits,” said UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner. The report also highlights the importance of ecosystems and the environmental aspects of food security, and is critical that past debates were mainly restricted to factors such as the availability of food and access to it. The authors issued recommendations on how to protect these ecological foundations and improve food security, which include: designing sustainable agriculture on a larger scale, improving soil management, securing efficient agricultural water use, supporting farmers and promoting sustainable diets with less meat consumption in developed countries.