Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN Forum)

I would like to express my agreement with the excellent comments submitted by the National FNS Council of Brazil (CONSEA) regarding the objectives and content of the stocktaking analysis being undertaken by CFS.  I urge colleagues to join me in expressing profound concern about the recent declaration by the newly elected President of Brazil announcing the immediate extinction of the CONSEA (international petitions:  https://www.fian.org/get-involved/take-action/campaigns/; https://foodsecurecanada.org/resources-news/news-media/brasil-consea-abolished).  For 15 years, the CONSEA has served as an example to the world of how civil society and government can work together to implement an effective multi-sectoral national plan to fight hunger and improve food security and nutrition based a human-rights based approach and civil society participation defined by law.  The comments submitted by CONSEA are just one example of its active and highly qualified engagement in international discussions over the years, including in the CFS.

Regarding the content of the stocktaking analysis, I offer two additional comments from my perspective as a consultant on the Food Security Statistics team in the FAO Statistics Division about challenges related to building a global FSN narrative towards 2030:

• Despite the evolution in thinking reflected in the 2030 Agenda, which is universal and therefore relevant to all countries, some international agencies and development partners  face challenges in making the transition from a focus primarily on lower income countries to a broader focus on inequalities and at-risk populations present in all countries.   The CONSEA correctly points out that it is “essential to considerate the specificities of different countries in the process of defining great strategies, since the same proposal, depending on the local conditions, can generate deepening of inequalities and food insecurity”.  At the same time, acknowledging and identifying food insecure populations in all countries, including high-income countries, can help reveal the underlying forces that perpetuate food insecurity and malnutrition in rich and poor countries alike. The metric “Prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity based on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale” (SDG indicator 2.1.2) was developed specifically to cover the range of severity of food insecurity present across low-to-high income countries.  It is particularly relevant in the current scenario of rising rates of obesity among the poor in countries of all income levels. 
• It is important to make the link between the two thematic clusters “Knowledge and technology” and “Governance” described in the “Critical and emerging issues for FSN”. It is noted under the “Knowledge and technology” thematic cluster that “information needs to be collected to accurately measure food insecurity, globally and to assess sustainable food consumption patterns. Adequate metrics need to be developed in this context and at different scales”.  The activity of measuring and monitoring food insecurity should be integrated with governance.  A major challenge is the need to build the statistical capacities of national institutions to monitor various aspects of food insecurity in their own countries. While FAO is fully engaged in building national capacities to monitor food access using existing metrics (SDG indicators 2.1.1 and 2.1.2), there is a need to develop and promote metrics for dietary quality that are comparable across countries. 

I refer to the request of submitters to share the most recent references that should be considered in this study because they describe important evolutions of the knowledge on FSN since the publication of a given HLPE thematic report.

With regards to this, I have just received some comments from a colleague in New Zealand on references to be considered in the study (attached).

I’d be happy to answer any questions as required.

Kind regards,

Don Syme

Counsellor (Primary Industries)

Deputy Permanent Representative to FAO

New Zealand Embassy Rome | Manatū Aorere

Dear Colleagues,

Thank you for this opportunity to contribute to building a global narrative on food security and nutrition. I enclosed a short paper which sketches such a narative (...towards a new socio-technical regime based on agroecology) using past trends and 2050 FAO projections. The reference and abstract of this paper are below. Best regards, Bruno.

Reference : Dorin Bruno, 2017. "India and Africa in the Global Agricultural System (1960-2050): Towards a New Sociotechnical Regime?", Economic & Political Weekly, LII:25-26, June 24,  pp. 5-13.

Abstract : The asynchronous but somewhat similar agricultural trajectories of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, especially India, are analysed over nearly a century (1961–2050). Millions of pieces of data available on the past (1961–2007) and on a plausible future (2006–50 projections by the Food and Agriculture Organization) are organised in a simple world food model where production, trade and consumption are aggregated and balanced in calories. Given the current and/or future land–labour relationships that characterise India and Africa, can these regions experience the same structural transformation that the developed countries went through, or work together towards a new sociotechnical regime by developing their own regionally differentiated labour-intensive production investments and technological capacities for economic, social, and ecological sustainability?

A Holistic Description of the Projected State of Global Nutrition and Food Security in 2030

On account of the brevity of the proposed paper, it will have to be a holistic overview of the current situation, what efforts are now underway to achieve SDG-2 and other related goals, their effectiveness to achieve the objectives intended to have been attained by now, and finally, what revisions and new actions are to be undertaken to reach our goal.

Why this suggested change of title?

Borrowed from a now discredited ‘theory of literary criticism’ (narratology), the term narrative in its standard use means a description of a true or imagined event after it has taken place. Moreover, it does not imply that the narrators are going to do something to change either the current situation, or it by 2030. If we are going to improve the global FSN by the target year, then it cannot be a narrative, rather a description of a projected or an anticipated future state of affairs. I think the drafters of the document should pay very serious attention to these two points in order to avoid two unfortunate solecisms. Let us not forget that this document ought to embody a statement of intent, viz., enhanced state of global nutrition and food security by the target year.

The Proposed Structure of the Document:

If the document is to display its authors’ keen desire to improve the current state of global FSN, and not to remain just passive reporters, then the it will have to contain the following elements:

1. A clear and an unequivocal statement of feasible intent. Generally at this level, it would take the form of a politically supported statement of global policy with room for relevant regional and national adaptation with reference to level-specific needs. References to such policies would be very useful to eliminate the unnecessary clutter and enhance its clarity and readability. I think this element should be as brief as possible without compromising its completeness.

2. This element will give a summary of the current state of global FSN with documented references to it globally, regionally and nationally.

3. Next, the document will summarise the current efforts directed at attaining the objectives the above policies embody. These need not be exhaustive descriptions and references to relevant plans of action would suffice.

4. Evaluation and revision of of our current endeavours towards achieving global FSN. I think this section would occupy the bulk of the paper as FAO statistics for 2018 indicate a deterioration of the state of flobal nutrition. This implies a deficit between the anticipated results of the ongoing activities and their actual results. Hence, the urgent need for their evaluation and revision of the way forward.

It is clear that the the difference between the projected and the actual results of the current efforts are due to their inappropriateness or incompetent execution, or a combination of both. Thus, our next step would be to ascertain the appropriateness of those efforts and the competence shown in their execution. Unless these essential steps are taken, we have no sound basis on which to determine a revised way forward towards our objectives. Simply continuing the same activities and adding some more to them does not eliminate an already existing shortcoming. I would like to emphasise that we ignore the flaws in our current endeavours at our own peril, opening ourselves to the accusation of having wasted great deal of time and resources in vain.

Therefore, it is important now to identify the Challenges to Our Way Forward:

5. Here, the obvious question would be, what should be the current state of global FSN if we are going to attain our 2030 objectives at the present rate of improvement? But the data from the FAO paints a steadily worsening picture. Therefore, other things being equal, the current rate of global FSN enhancement is inadequate. Thus, we face a two-fold difficulty;

I. What would be the minimally adequate rate of progress in FSN that would eventually enable us to attain our objectives for 2030? Let us call this R.

II. Once we have a tenable notion of R, how are we going to make up the short fall between it and the current rate of progress towards global FSN? This may seem a point difficult to understand, but a short reflection will convince us that we are not going forward, and we have to do so at a certain minimum rate if we are to achieve SDG-2. So, first we need to increase our rate of progress, and at a minimum, we need to reduce the number of the hungry and inappropriately nourished by some rate which may not be the optimal. As statistics concerning SDG-2 are intentional rather than factual, so would be its annual rate of achievement. This however, does not detract its value as an important guide to follow as long as we do not do so slavishly.

III. Quantitative increase of the type of effort in current use is not an option as discussed above until their appropriateness and competence of execution are established beyond doubt. It is worthwhile remembering that unless a proposed activity takes in to account the the capabilities of those to whom its execution is delegated, that activity would be inappropriate for it is beyond the capacity of the people who are supposed to engage in it. Furthermore, the following attributes of a proposed activity/project would render it inappropriate:

A. It is not sustainable with reference to the currently available local resources.

B. It does not make a sufficient quantity of food available to the local population.

C. The food it makes available is not affordable to a significant number of the local people.

D. The food it makes available is not varied or wholesome, and does not allow the local majority to procure a balanced diet. It is often against the local food culture, and ignores the dietary enjoyment of the end-user as though we still live in pre-historic times just content to fill our bellies.

All too often, no attention is paid to what constitutes the quality of food, when one occasionally does, it is a simple reductive notion that comes in two flavours viz., nutritive content ignoring whether the food concerned is desirable to an end-user, or its lack of injurious substances. A classic example of the harm done by this kind of expertise is the introduction of wheat to countries whose main source of carbohydrates were rice and some other grain types like millet, which made the use of traditional vegetable side-dishes with wheaten products unappetizing, thusputting an important source of their vitamins and minerals into disuse. I need not go into the expense and environmental cost of this piece of development.

What I have said so far is how one sees it from an end-user’s point of view. After all, it is the end-users who fill global hunger statistics as mere numbers, and it is time we kept him within sight. Let us now look at the type of activity we should engage in to achieve our objective.

6. I think that there is a general agreement on that such activities represent the use of a food system, their improvement (by no means through the introduction of ‘cutting edge’ technology.), its expansion and/revision. Meanwhile, use of a food system is governed by a certain set of external conditions that determine the exact composition of the sub-systems that makes up a food system. We will consider those important conditions in point 8 below.

7. For the sake of brevity, I shall not discuss the flaws in most current food systems inuse. The interested reader may find a useful account of it here: http://www.fao.org/fsnforum/sites/default/files/discussions/contributions/SFS_Manavado_.docx

8. As will be seen in the proposals outlined in the above link, our first food systems were simple tools intended to satisfy our nutritional needs by using our hunting and gathering skills to harvest food from our environment. Then those controlling conditions were the weather, richness of the environment and our own physical ability. However, they evolved in complexity in line with the social evolution of a social group involved. What is crucial to remember here, is that regardless of its current sophistication, its sole justifiable reason for existence is serving as a tool that enables us to procure our food. Value of food arises from its being the third essential thing for life after air and water. Many putative food systems that are said to represent ‘value chains’ are based on arguments categorically similar to those used by astrologers, charm pedlars and vendors of patent medicines. I have dealt with the anatomy of a justifiable food system in the article to which I have refered earlier.

9. Social advancement that fuelled the evolution of our food systems began to impose on it a wide variety of controls. Earlier, when it only served a family group, what controlled a food system was its user’s capacity to develop and use it, geographic and climatic factors and the salubriousness of one’s environment. The very first two real limitation man experienced in using a food system were the sudden adverse climatic changes and the impoverishment of the soil owing to the repeated cultivation of a crop in an area. We learned to compensate for these through the development of a supplementation sub-system appended to a food system. (see the article refered to above).

10. Most of the present food systems are designed to enable one to procure food through exchanging money for food, which is often far from a fair exchange. So, for most of us, earning enough to procure an adequate diet becomes a matter of critical importance. Complexities of our society has necessitated a fairly extensive governmental control of many aspects of social life, which is enforced with varying degrees of success.

11. Some of those controls manifest themselves as governmental policies to guide and direct courses of action beneficial to the people of a country, for no individual or a group will be able to undertake such action. However, such actions cover a wide variety of areas and achieving food security requires not only sound policies on agriculture, trade, employment, education, health, security etc., and their adequate implementation.

12. Unless one is very careful, those policies will often pull in opposite directions and will become obstructive to one another. So, it is essential to ensure that they display an inter-policy harmony, which when achieved will enable one to achieve the national goals associated with them. In addition, it is equally important to ensure that a given policy does not contain elements or modes of implementation that are in irrelevant or inappropriate. Their presence in a policy results in a lack of intra-policy harmony in it that renders it ineffective and wasteful.

The last four points here touches on the two major areas where an extensive overhaul has long been overdue, viz., the food systems in use and government policies in nearly every other area, for unless adequate employment cannot be achieved, it would make no sense to talk on increased food production as human population growth and demographic aggrigation continues apace. I think what we intend to do in those two related areas ought to form the concluding part of the document, and hope it would explore labour-intensive methods offering decent wages and an actual devolution of agro-economy as it has happened to political power.

Best wishes!

Lal Manavado.

Dear Moderator

I strongly concur with the points made by a number of those commenting on this document - the issue of food and nutritional insecurity can only be addressed by taking a multi-disciplinary, multi-sectorial approach to integrated rural development. There is also great potential to enrich this process by including the much over-looked traditionally- and culturally-important indigenous food species which can be easily domesticated as new crop plants with which to diversify farming systems and kick-start the restoration of degraded agroecosystems. Please see the attached documents.

Best wishes

Roger Leakey

Dear organizers,

I am happy to share with you my approach of the so so interesting to interst. I am actually finalizing a thesis on the topic A FOOD DEMAND SYSTEM APPRAOCH TO FOOD SECURITY and on of my contributions is the link between food demand system, food security, and Agroecology. Using the huang(1996) couppled to the AIDS of Deaton and  Muelbualler (1980), we investigate the differences in contribution of food demand system to the food security objective  in  the five agroecologies of CAMEROON.

Dear All,

Please find attached the contribution of the Food and Nutrition Security National Council (Brazil’s Presidency of Republic).

Yours faithfully,

Thaís Lopes Rocha

Secretaria Executiva

Conselho Nacional de Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional

Presidência da República

Palácio do Planalto, Anexo I, Ala A, sala 100, Brasília-DF

(61) 3411-3124

Dear colleagues,

Many thanks for the opportunity to contribute in this e-consultation.

I think that there is a need to adopt a holistic, systemic approach (cf. ‘food system approach’) in the report in such a way to highlight linkages between elements (environment, people, infrastructures, institutions, etc.), activities (production, processing, distribution, preparation, consumption, food waste) and outputs/outcomes (socio-economic, environmental).

 Given the transformational and forward-looking ambition of the Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), I do believe that the report should not only provide a general picture but also analyze the ongoing processes and dynamics in the agro-food systems as well as their implications. For that, reference to ‘sustainability transitions’ literature is crucial.

It is also important to analyze linkages between the three components of SDG 2 “Zero Hunger” i.e. food security, improved nutrition, sustainable agriculture.

Building a global, coherent and comprehensive narrative around FSN and sustainable development implies showing how the recommendations of CFS and the publications of its HLPE can contribute to achieving the different targets of SDG 2 (both outcome targets – 2.1 to 2.5 - and process targets – 2.a to 2.c). In particular, it would be interesting to see how the political recommendations and guidance of CFS/HLPE can help achieving process targets (increasing investment to enhance agricultural productive capacity in developing countries; correcting and preventing trade restrictions and distortions in world agricultural markets; ensuring the proper functioning of food commodity markets).

Moreover, I think that the report should also analyze the multifaceted and multidimensional relations (both synergies/ co-benefits and trade-offs) between SDG 2 and other SDGs.

I attach our recent publication entitled “Food and nutrition security and sustainability transitions in food systems” in which we highlight linkages between sustainability transitions and food and nutrition security using the perspective of sustainable food systems (https://doi.org/10.1002/fes3.154).

Best regards,

Hamid El Bilali

Hamid El Bilali

Centre for Development Research

University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU)

Vienna, Austria

Dear moderator,

We have just produced a book to explain an old but new narrative to substantiate the moral grounds to transit towards different (fairer and more sustainable) food systems: the consideration and governance of food as a commons and public good, instead of being merely considered as a priced commodity to be distributed by market mechanisms.

The Handbook, co-edited with Oliver De Schutter, Ugo Mattei and Tomaso Ferrando, has more than 400 pages with 24 chapters and 36 authors from four continents, with different epistemic regards and academic and activist backgrounds. Moreover, there are many policy options that could be explored (detailed in the conclusions chapter that can be open accessed in the link below), should this narrative be enacted.

https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Food-as-a-Commons/Vivero-Pol-Ferrando-Schutter-Mattei/p/book/9781138062627

The idea of "food as a commons and public good" is not present in the blurb that you have just distributed for this HLPE report. We consider that this valuation of food (amore attuned to non-Western cultures, peasants cosmovisions and non-market ideologies) could unlock many policy options that are so far neglected and obscured by the dominant "food commodity" narrative.

We would be glad to present these ideas and the policy implications in a future event at FAO, either within the framework of the HLPE or in any other format.

Regards and Merry Christmas!

P.D. The two open-access chapters are herewith attached for your information.

Jose Luis

In the indogangetic plains of India it is increasingly felt that the use efficiency of inputs is getting decreased at an alarming rate resulting increased and indiscriminate use of inorganic inputs.

As a matter of fact farmer has a multidimensional problems with reference to availability,exorbitant price and spurious material in the name of inputs which is complicating the situation.In our efforts to overcome this

situation our group has initiated work on kits for quality control, suggesting package and protocol under the purview of integrated resource management.An user friendly quality control kit has been developed and onfarm priming is being advocated for wider purpose with perspective of input use efficiency as well plant protection point of view and adaptability to abiotic stress.