Speaking from the Northern Canadian Indigenous experience of food insecurity within Canadian food systems, and from the state perspective, these are the following elements that I would hope the HLPE report could speak to:
1. The need to decolonize public policy related to food system access (particularly with respect to traditional indigenous foods)
2. The application of an Indigenous lens to the research, development and implementation of the report.
3. Food sovereignty must be central to the discussion as it implies a whole host of other determinants that is not necessarily captured in food "security" or food systems. Obviously as applied to the Indigenous context.
4. Mechanisms for monitoring and evaluation built into the conceptual framework
5. Concrete evidence-informed public policy prescriptions that serve to operationalize recommendations of the report
6. Not all instances of food system failure (food insecurity) revolve around large-scale agricultural production. In fact, the food system failures that affect the northern Indigenous Canadian experience of food insecurity are driven precisely beacuse of the geographical limitations of large scale agricultural production. Including a focus on small-scale farming is better but still doesn't account for the physical limitations of the northern canadian coontext. This might be too unique to incorporate, but it would be great to see some consideration given to the different kinds of food system failures (in this case geographical isolation in lands unsuitable for large scale production thereby precluding the possibility of tying eocnomic opportunity to food production on a large scale.)
7. Concerted effort to underpin food insecurity with the grinding poverty that is driven by a lack of economic opportunites in the aforementioned geographically siolated areas. This will likely be drawn out in the discussion on the multiplicity of determinants of health that drive food system failure but just to be sure....
8. Monopoly retailers are a large part of the problem for northern Canada. So a discussion on the role of concentrated corporate power to affect the state's food system policy could be helpful....
Andi Sharma - Senior Food Security Policy Analyst - Government of Manitoba, Canada
Andi Sharma