On Tuesday, the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance (EAA), a broad international network of churches and Christian organisations, published a paper which calls for increased investment in sustainable agricultural practices in order to support small-scale farmers and protect the environment. The paper, entitled “Nourishing the World: Scaling up Agroecology” comprises numerous success stories which demonstrate how agroecological methods have increased yields for farmers by using locally-available natural resources. At the same time, these methods have reduced farmers’ dependency on expensive and polluting chemical fertilisers and pesticides. The release of the paper coincided with the publication of the FAO’s new figures on global hunger which show that 870 million people are still suffering from hunger. EAA underlines that hunger is not caused by a lack of food: Worldwide, enough food is produced to feed 10 billion people. “Tackling hunger is not in the first instance about producing more food. It is about investing responsibly in sustainable agricultural practices and changing wasteful consumer habits”, said EAA’s Food Campaign Coordinator, Christine Campeau. The paper provides alternatives to the current industrial model of agriculture. “In the context of climate change, business as usual in the field of food production is not an option. Agroecology offers the prospect of sustainable food production to meet the needs of a still growing global population, while at the same time reducing the global greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector, building resilience to already unavoidable climate change, protecting biodiversity and sustaining communities and rural livelihoods”, the paper concludes.