I have read with interest background paper and contributions and Liberation is certainly most welcome. But I believe we are yet again missing the link with sustainable diets and livelihoods. What is being grown and who is the consumer is central to the way natural resources are managed. And local populations are key in maintaining and enhancing ecosystem services.
Many contributions refer to the problems generated by the industrial agriculture model. This has been coming up in many arenas in the last decade: in health with the emergence of noncommunicable diseases, in the poverty debates, in the International year of family agriculture, etc. People from different wakes of life agree that we need sustainable food systems and ecological intensification is part of it. There is therefore a window of opportunity for increased synergy.
But the way institutions function does not allow this to happen. Complexity is a challenge and an opportunity. But the official speech is still about value chains, research institutions have a hard time moving away from their comfort zones, scientific expectations and methodologies, and of course the root cause are economic interests and funding.
Natural Resources Management, Health and Food Security need to engage in and be held accountable to systematic dialogue and joint action within a rights-based approach. This would be particularly timely in the wake of the Sustainable Development Summit and CoP21. The gap between environment and food security needs to be dealt with: it is presented as a tradeoff but it can be a win-win. The technical debate is of course essential, but we cannot detach it from the institutional and political context.
Д-р. Florence Egal