Confronted with an increasing inflation and rising prices of staple foods, it is urgent to focus efforts on those points in the food systems that can facilitate availability, accessibility and desirability of healthy and diversified foods, especially for the most vulnerable populations and groups. As FAO-ESN Team, we believe that, being food environments the interface between food supply and demand and including a series of market and non-market based factors that influence people’s food acquisition and consumption, they are critical for food security and need to be taken into consideration in nutrition-sensitive strategies. In fact, food environments are an emerging, but promising area of work. Interventions can range from the consumer-end ‘backwards’ to the retail management and/or ‘outwards’ to address enabling environment and regulating policies. Therefore, we strongly suggest considering food environments as a key issue affecting FSN and include it either as an additional separate topic or as a crosscutting issue, as it is interlinked with all the other issues presented.
In the last year, our team's work focuses on the food retail environment ("critical", as it "influences all aspects of the food environment", i.e. what foods are available, their price, quality, convenience and promotion), and in particular on the mapping territorial markets, which, being at the heart of local food systems, are crucial for ensuring food security and nutrition in the territories in which they are embedded and thus in influencing food patterns. Reference can be made to our first-hand data collection on 60 territorial markets in 8 countries, carried out over the past year. The initiative was done using FAO methodology for mapping of territorial markets, which was developed as a direct response to 2016 CFS policy recommendations "Connecting Smallholders to Markets", referring to the need to collect comprehensive data on formal and informal markets, rural and urban and linked to local, national and regional food systems. The initiative produced a valuable set of data on both retailers and consumers who attend these local, territorial markets, and the data can be disaggregated by gender, age, different food groups (and more).
The whole methodology is designed to inform policy-making processes that seek strategic entry points in the food systems for improving local diets and nutrition. We strongly believe that territorial markets represent this crucial entry point for working on the systemic change for increasing availability, access and desirability of healthy and diversified foods for low-income consumers. Moreover, our analysis on the effects of the rise in food prices induced by the COVID-19 pandemic in the mapped countries, provided insights on the importance of making territorial markets more resilient to price volatility and to different types of shocks, including conflicts. This demonstrates that improving and investing in territorial markets is a sine qua non condition to build the overall resilience of food systems and to protect consumers’ diets.
In addition to this comment, we attach a short document that further illustrates the role of territorial markets in shaping healthy diets supported by concrete examples from our mapping exercise.
Ms. Sara Hoogerwerf
Confronted with an increasing inflation and rising prices of staple foods, it is urgent to focus efforts on those points in the food systems that can facilitate availability, accessibility and desirability of healthy and diversified foods, especially for the most vulnerable populations and groups. As FAO-ESN Team, we believe that, being food environments the interface between food supply and demand and including a series of market and non-market based factors that influence people’s food acquisition and consumption, they are critical for food security and need to be taken into consideration in nutrition-sensitive strategies. In fact, food environments are an emerging, but promising area of work. Interventions can range from the consumer-end ‘backwards’ to the retail management and/or ‘outwards’ to address enabling environment and regulating policies. Therefore, we strongly suggest considering food environments as a key issue affecting FSN and include it either as an additional separate topic or as a crosscutting issue, as it is interlinked with all the other issues presented.
In the last year, our team's work focuses on the food retail environment ("critical", as it "influences all aspects of the food environment", i.e. what foods are available, their price, quality, convenience and promotion), and in particular on the mapping territorial markets, which, being at the heart of local food systems, are crucial for ensuring food security and nutrition in the territories in which they are embedded and thus in influencing food patterns. Reference can be made to our first-hand data collection on 60 territorial markets in 8 countries, carried out over the past year. The initiative was done using FAO methodology for mapping of territorial markets, which was developed as a direct response to 2016 CFS policy recommendations "Connecting Smallholders to Markets", referring to the need to collect comprehensive data on formal and informal markets, rural and urban and linked to local, national and regional food systems. The initiative produced a valuable set of data on both retailers and consumers who attend these local, territorial markets, and the data can be disaggregated by gender, age, different food groups (and more).
The whole methodology is designed to inform policy-making processes that seek strategic entry points in the food systems for improving local diets and nutrition. We strongly believe that territorial markets represent this crucial entry point for working on the systemic change for increasing availability, access and desirability of healthy and diversified foods for low-income consumers. Moreover, our analysis on the effects of the rise in food prices induced by the COVID-19 pandemic in the mapped countries, provided insights on the importance of making territorial markets more resilient to price volatility and to different types of shocks, including conflicts. This demonstrates that improving and investing in territorial markets is a sine qua non condition to build the overall resilience of food systems and to protect consumers’ diets.
In addition to this comment, we attach a short document that further illustrates the role of territorial markets in shaping healthy diets supported by concrete examples from our mapping exercise.