TICAD 7: Nutrition Improvement in all Africa through the Initiative for Food and Nutrition in Africa (IFNA)

27 August 2019

 

TICAD 7: Nutrition Improvement in all Africa through the Initiative for Food and Nutrition in Africa (IFNA)

 

I am pleased to join this panel to discuss the work of the Initiative for Food and Nutrition Security in Africa, IFNA and share with you FAO’s views and vision.

For FAO, nutrition goes beyond ensuring adequate food. It indicates health, productivity and overall well-being of people and prosperity of societies.

Our vision at FAO is that addressing the various aspects of the nutrition theme will lead to substantive socio-economic improvements.

For the African continent, the situation is a serious one: In July this year, FAO and partners had the opportunity to launch the Report on State of Food Security and Nutrition (SOFI) in New York at the High Level Political forum. The report demonstrated that:

• Hunger is on the rise in almost all African subregions;
• About 680 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa do not have access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food.

So allow me to state very clearly, fighting hunger and all forms of malnutrition is, and will continue to be, FAO’s main priority in Africa. I come here to offer the long-term commitment on behalf of FAO and myself.

We need innovative approaches and new ideas with a focus on Pro-Poor and result-oriented actions.

In this respect, FAO has a unique role to play. As a knowledge Organization, provider of global public goods and a trusted neutral partner, FAO can strengthen the capacity of countries to evaluate and monitor the nutrition situation, provide standards and norms and support knowledge transfer.

We have the technologies to improve food production, but we need to go beyond the production perspective and focus on all aspects of the food system.

FAO wants to increase productivity, availability and accessibility of nutrient-dense food through investments in agriculture, regulatory frame-works, public-private partnerships, technology and innovations in a sustainable way.

This is why the IFNA initiative is very important.

FAO has been supporting IFNA since it was launched three years ago and will continue to do so.

IFNA’s objective aligns very well with FAO’s vision. For instance, FAO and IFNA firmly believe in integrating the agricultural sector into nutrition interventions.

Excellencies,

I take this opportunity to acknowledge and thank Japan for the very fruitful collaborations with FAO in Africa over the last decades. Japan has been supporting FAO:

• in the development of efficient and inclusive rice value chains
• in the strengthening of Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs)
• and in the measurement of food loss and waste among food industry.

And we continue to count on Japan’s generosity in scaling up its support for improvement of nutrition in Africa.

Japan can share its knowledge on smart technologies, agricultural machinery (especially small and medium-size  machineries) and marketing, thereby facilitating the export of African products.

Small and medium enterprises are the front-runners for nutrition in Africa.

Our goal is to contribute to the transfer of wisdom and experience of Japan to the African continent, to improve livelihood and help with the development of labor-intensive industries to provide more jobs to farmers.

I hope this event today will leverage our potential to work together, and support African countries in their fight to eliminate poverty, end hunger and improve nutrition, and for African people to have a better life and happy life with nutritious food.

Thank you very much.