Corinna Hawkes Director of FAO The Food Systems and Safety Division says a holistic and sustainable approach is needed that considers economic, social and environmental factors, and brings people together, to ensure nutritious food and sustainable livelihoods for all.
She is speaking first United Nations Food System Summit+2 Inventory Timewill look at global agricultural systems.
What is an agricultural system?
Corinna Hawkes: The agri-food system is everything that is connected to food and agriculture. What we eat and how it is sold, distributed and prepared. It also includes how food is grown or harvested on land, at sea, and other non-food products, such as fuel and fiber. All of these processes involve a wide range of activities, investments and decisions.
Corinna Hawkes, Director of the Department of Food Systems and Food Safety at FAO.
An agri-food system brings all of these together into an interconnected system; for example, if we want to grow fruits and vegetables so that people eat healthier, we think not only about growing vegetables but also about how they are made available to people.
Agricultural systems are also spaces for solutions including climate change, biodiversity loss, malnutrition, chronic disease, food insecurity, poverty, and combating urban unsustainability. Agricultural systems are the solution to the world’s most important challenges.
Why does the world need to transform the agricultural system?
A fisherman in Ghana harvesting morning fish.
Right now, the power to deliver those solutions is not there. The agricultural system is sick. The way it’s designed and works means it’s weak, old, and lacking in resilience.
So the frustration and challenge here is that the latent power of the agricultural system to provide these solutions is lost until we transform it to make it stronger.
Some of the major challenges include how food is grown and produced that is contributing to climate change, which in turn weakens agri-food systems.
What is an example of a major current challenge in agri-food systems?
One thing we did was take too much variety out of the system, including everything from what’s on our plate to the farm. So we need to bring that diversity back.
Over the past decades there has been specialization in the production of several major commodity crops. This is a great idea from a productivity and efficiency perspective; it reduces the value of food, meaning you can trade food and reduce production costs. It is important that we produce these crops efficiently.
But what we have seen is that reducing diversity too much reduces the resilience of the system. And we’ve seen with recent conflicts how reliance on certain key producers further weakens resilience.
Diversity is also good for biodiversity and the environment, as well as nutrition for consumers.
How can these challenges be overcome?
In Senegal, new farming methods are being introduced to combat the effects of climate change.
There are many ways to transform the agri-food system. The most important way is to bring all the systems together, which is necessary to bring people together.
One of the major challenges is that different people are trying to overcome biodiversity, nutrition or food security, while others are trying to overcome poverty and the livelihoods of agricultural producers.
We need to work together in the system and figure out how to deliver these solutions. In this way, we will begin to see that the agri-food system that appears to be a problem because it is weak, is actually something very powerful.
What good practices are being promoted right now?
I’m really excited about some of the initiatives going on at the local, urban and city levels. There’s a lot of energy in cities big and small, where local governments and multiple stakeholders are really taking action.
They are improving the market infrastructure so people can have more access to food, keep food safe, and reduce loss and waste.
So we’re starting to see these important connections made, and that’s happening in hundreds of cities around the world.
What can we expect from the upcoming United Nations Food Systems Summit +2 Inventory Moment?
What I hope to see from the Inventory meeting two years after the United Nations Food Systems Summit is that governments and many other stakeholders will come together to honestly discuss challenges and share their successes and challenges in creating change.
I would like to see a spirit of solidarity between the government and other stakeholders, who can agree that they will do better together if they share experiences and good practices to overcome challenges.
The ideal outcome of the summit is that the momentum created will continue and the commitment to change will not stop at the level of commitment but will lead to actual actions to actually bring about change.
