HLPE e-consultation – Sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition, including the role of livestock
Proposed text for the FAO Corporate Response from Strategic Objective 2 “Increase and improve provision of goods and services from agriculture, forestry and fisheries in a sustainable manner”
FAO welcomes the selection of the theme “Sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition, including the role of livestock” by the CFS41. Sustainability is a critical issue, particularly vibrant as the United Nations are in the process of defining a post-2015 sustainable development agenda. To efficiently contribute to this global momentum, the topic deserves to be comprehensively addressed, and the HLPE report will certainly contribute to give an authoritative perspective to the subject.
Having examined the scoping paper and the contributions that were offered during the online consultation process, we would like to submit the following suggestions about the report’s scope and the subsequent work.
According to its Member Countries’ recommendations, FAO recently structured its work around five Strategic Objectives. Sustainability is at the core of this new strategic framework as it constitutes Strategic Objective 2 (SO2), that aims at making agriculture, forestry and fisheries more sustainable.
To support and accelerate the transition to sustainable food and agriculture systems, FAO has developed a Common Vision for Sustainable Food and Agriculture (SFA). SFA is now SO2’s flagship and FAO’s corporate approach to sustainability. This framework is being used by FAO in its contributions to SDGs discussions for sustainable agriculture and will serve as the background for the State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) report, FAO’s flagship annual publication, in 2016.
Integrating the Organization’s extensive work on sustainability, SFA provides a conceptual framework based on five principles that are valid across agricultural sub-sectors (crops, livestock, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture), and that could contribute to structure the thinking about objectives and elements of sustainable approaches to agriculture:
- Improving efficiency in the use of resources is crucial to sustainable agriculture
- Sustainability requires direct action to conserve, protect and enhance natural resources
- Agriculture that fails to protect and improve rural livelihoods, equity and social well-being is unsustainable
- Enhanced resilience of people, communities and ecosystems is key to sustainable agriculture
- Sustainable food and agriculture requires responsible and effective governance mechanisms
FAO would therefore like to propose that the HLPE considers using the framework offered by this report as a tool in its analysis of the issues related to sustainability.
More details on the SFA approach are available at: http://www.fao.org/3/a-i3940e/index.html.
Clayton Campanhola
Strategic Objective 2 Coordinator
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Strategic Objective 2 FAO