The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) underlined the crucial importance of concrete measures to accelerate people’s access to healthy diets by transforming agrifood systems to be more resilient, efficient, sustainable and inclusive.
“We need to increase resilience; that means capacity to prevent, capacity to absorb and capacity to build back better,” said FAO Chief Economist Máximo Torero, who moderated a breakout session at a recent ministerial meeting of the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture focused on “Agrifood systems transformation: a worldwide response to multiple crises.”
Among the themes underlined by many countries and organizations in the session was the need for open, transparent and free agrifood markets and trade, critical to address current food security issues.
Another key takeaway was that the challenges of the agriculture sector are similar across the world, including extreme climate events such as floods and droughts, soaring prices for agricultural inputs and the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
To address these issues, the need to boost the resilience at country level for farmers and especially for smallholder farmers was particularly highlighted, along with the importance of putting agrifood systems center stage at the upcoming COP28 climate talks. Agriculture contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and at the same time is vulnerable to climate change, hence agrifood systems should be a key topic at the upcoming discussions.
The final GFFA communique highlighted the role of the inter-agency Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS) as well as a number of initiatives in which FAO plays a key role including: the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, the FAO Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture , the FAO Framework for Action on Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture, FAO’s work on soil mapping and the establishment of a UN Food Systems Coordination Hub hosted at FAO.
Finance and urban food
Over the three-day GFFA meeting, FAO participated in a High Level Panel and held several expert panels including: Financing sustainable transformation in the agrifood systems: Gaps and opportunities.
This event highlighted the fact that agriculture and land use received only 26 percent of the global climate finance flows to all sectors between 2000 and 2018. In this context, a boost in investment is essential to transform the world’s agrifood systems, while supporting countries’ access to climate finance and ensuring that appropriate financial resources reach small and medium-scale food producers.
Urbanization, along with climate change and technological progress, is contributing to a sea change in the way food is produced and consumed, meaning cities and local governments need greater support in helping build a sustainable agrifood systems transformation.
With 70 percent of global food consumed in urban areas, the event focused on innovative ways to strengthen the role and function of urban and local food systems. The FAO flagship report on the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023, to be launched in July, will address the same issue.
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