Nutrition and Food Systems - HLPE consultation on the V0 draft of the Report
At its 42nd session in October 2015, the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) requested the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) to prepare a report on Nutrition and Food Systems. This report is expected to be presented at CFS 44 in October 2017.
As part of the process of elaboration of its reports, the HLPE is organizing a consultation to seek inputs, suggestions, and comments on the present V0 draft. This open e-consultation will be used by the HLPE to further elaborate the report, which will then be submitted to external expert review, before finalization and approval by the HLPE Steering Committee.
HLPE V0 drafts are deliberately presented early enough in the process - as a work-in-progress, with their range of imperfections – to allow sufficient time to give proper consideration to the feedback received so that it can play a really useful role in the elaboration of the report. It is a key part of the scientific dialogue between the HLPE Project Team and Steering Committee, and the rest of the knowledge community. It should be noted that the present V0 draft report does not yet identify areas for recommendations as it is too early to determine the major propositions stemming from the report.
It should be noted that there are several reports that have just been released or will be released over the coming year including the Foresight Report on the Future of Diets (September 2016) and the EAT-Lancet Commission on Sustainable Diets and Food Systems (June 2017). The Project Team members will ensure that these reports will be kept in due consideration.
In order to strengthen this draft, the HLPE would welcome submission of material, evidence-based suggestions, references, and examples, in particular addressing the following important questions:
- The purpose of this report is to analyse the ways in which food systems influence dietary patterns and hence nutritional outcomes. The objective is to focus on consumers and consider sustainability issues. The report aims to be solution oriented and to highlight efficient policies and programs. Are those major objective(s) clearly reflected in the V0 draft?
- Do you think that the overall structure of the draft is comprehensive enough, and adequately considered and articulated? Does the draft strike the right balance of coverage across the various chapters? Are there important aspects that are missing? Does the report correctly focus on the links between nutrition and food systems without straying beyond that?
- Does the conceptual framework need to be edited? Simplified? Should “the food environment” as defined in the draft be central to the framework?
- Are production systems and their role in shaping diets and nutritional outcomes adequately addressed?
- Does this draft cover adequately the main controversies in the field of Nutrition and food systems? Are there any remaining gaps?
- The project team is working on a categorization of food systems. Are you aware of specific approaches of use in that perspective, and particularly of quantitative indicators that could be used?
- Does this draft adequately show the multiplicity and complexity of diets and nutrition issues across different food systems and specific contexts with a good regional balance?
- What areas of the document are in need of strengthening or shortening?
- Chapter 4, Section 4.1 contains case studies/examples of effective policies and actions in different contexts/countries across the food system for diets and nutrition. Could you offer other practical, well-documented and significant examples to enrich and provide better balance to the variety of cases and the lessons learned, including the trade-offs or win-win outcomes in terms of addressing the different dimensions of diets for FSN?
- Section 4.2.2 on “Institutional Changes and Governance Across the Food System Movements for Nutrition” requires more work, and more inclusion of evidence and of the various players. Any inputs on this section are most welcome.
- Is the report too technical or too simplistic? Are all the concepts clearly defined?
- Are there any major omissions or gaps in the report? Are topics under-or over-represented in relation to their importance?
We thank in advance all the contributors for being kind enough to read and comment and suggest inputs on this early version of the report.
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Dear members of the HLPE team,
This is a zero draft of the document, nevertheless it already gives a quite comprehensive overview of issues. I feel this zero draft is promising but would benefit from a more "systemic" view.
I have read quite a few of the comments and since I don't want to repeat others I keep my comment very brief:
The team is still working on a categorisation of food systems. This work may benefit from a report that was published by UNSCN earlier this year: "Investments for healthy food systems", available at: unscn.org. The UNSCN paper about "impact measurements of food systems policies" may also proof useful for the project team. This paper is also available at unscn.org
Related to chapter 4: This chapter would need a strong link to the categorisation of food systems. What is currently lacking in chapter 4 is the analysis of how the examples relate with, fit or don't fit in a certain food system. At this moment the cases and examples are reported on at project level, or programme level at most, without any relation to the entire food system. Not all examples are relevant to all food systems and the question the chapter would need to answer is which examples are capable of tipping food system(s) in such a way that the renewed food system delivers healthy and systainable diets to all people at all times. A related question that needs answering is how much critical mass ( provided through the examples and cases in chapter 4) is needed to create that tipping point.
Related to the level of "simplicity"of the report: I believe the authors need to take care not to mistake valuechains for food systems. These are two very distinct concepts, where a valuechain can at most be a ( small) part of a food system.
I am looking forward reading a next version of the report.
Attached are comments on behalf of the Global Harvest Initiative. Our comments address question number 4: Are production systems and their role in shaping diets and nutrition outcomes adequately address?
We feel that some additional work can be done in this area. In it's current format, the report reflects primarily two types of agriculture - "industrial" agriculture and agroecology. In our comments, we express our concerns about the characterization of large-scale production agriculture in the report, especially as it relates to the sustainability of food systems. We offer some data-driven insights, based on data from FAO and USDA, on the relationship between agriculture and sustainability, especially in light of climate change. We encourage the authors to adopt a more nuanced approach to its discussion of agricultural production so that it more accurately reflects the complexities and challenges of producing sufficient nutritious affordable food for a growing world.
We also offer case studies for consideration that highlight public-private-producer partnerships to increase the productivity, sustainability and nutrition of food systems, while protecting the natural resource base and helping farmers adapt to climate change.
Ann Steensland
Deputy Director, Global Harvest Initiative.
This is a very throrough and complete report of the relationship between food systems and nutrition. I would have liked to also view the chapter on the typologies fully developed. I do, however, have a few comments that are all included in the attached document, mainly related to the consumer/demand side of the report.
Dear CFS/HLPE,
please find attached comments to the HLPE report on Nutrition and Food systems from Arla Foods.
Best regards
Elin J Boll
Dear Panel,
In order to avoid repeating comments that were already made I went through the comments submitted previously and limit myself to issues that I feel were missing from these submissions.
General comments:
Definitions and concepts: FAO has developed a common vision and an integrated approach to sustainability across agriculture, forestry and fisheries. The 5 principles of the Sustainable Food and Agriculture (SFA) approach has been endorsed by COAG (FAO’s Committee on Agriculture). This approach should be included in section 1.1. and section 4.2.2. (find further information at http://www.fao.org/sustainability/background/principle-1/en/).
Coverage of different sectors of agriculture production: While the report tries to cover the different sectors of agriculture that contribute to food production (crop and livestock production, aquaculture and fisheries and foresty), there are quite some biases towards crop production. This should be reviewed (e.g. p16 line 42-49 is also true for livestock production).
Micronutrients: I think it would be important and helpful if the panel provided some summary statistics on micronutrient deficiencies and a list of the most important micronutrients and which foods/food groups contains them. Animal-source foods (meat, eggs, milk, dairy products, honey, fish, seafood etc) provide not only a source of protein but particularly a range of micronutrients that are absent or only in small quantities in plant based foods. (E.g. Please review section 2.3.3 on Iodine deficiency – no mention of animal-source foods and fish and seafood but related to lack of Iodine in soils.) This is also important when we talk about obesity and overconsumption of animal-source foods. In adequate quantities, animal-source foods should be an essential part of the diet of particularly children and pregnant women. Culturally however, women and children tend to receive less animal-source foods than men.
Smallholders vs multinational companies: The role of smallholders in production is not sufficiently emphasized (see e.g. http://agro.biodiver.se/2016/11/smallholders-are-bigger-than-you-imagine/?utm_source=Agro.biodiver.se+subscribers&utm_campaign=3c95f6c1e7-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_949cf01306-3c95f6c1e7-109200741). Smallholders are usually disadvantaged because of the relative small quantities that they produce and struggle to produce standardized quality that is required by processing plants. The unequal power of big companies should be more emphasized. Also at some places in the report it would be important to also specifically mention pastoralists (e.g. p16 line 39).
Nutrition education: The importance of nutrition education is hardly mentioned in the report. It should be far more emphasized particularly in relation to women and home gardening which should be an important element of farmer field schools and extension services.
Antimicrobial resistance: AMR should be far more emphasized in the report. It is only linked to “concentrated” livestock production (btw – page 49 line 30 reads strange).
Need for good data: (page 109) should be expanded and completed; e.g. lacks need for food composition data
Specific comments:
Page 48 line 30 down: How about GHG emissions from rice production.
Page 49 line 15: new breeding should be replaced with genetic improvement
Page 58 line 33: access to education and knowledge (extension service) e.g. to specific gardening knowledge of vegetables and fruits, is lacking
Figures 27 and 28: focus on crop production only
Page 74 section on innovation and research drivers focus on crop production only
Page 94: section on emerging technologies in food safety focus on crop production only
Please find the German comments on the VO draft attached.
Kind regards,
Oliver
Regarding cross-sectoral collaboration, much can be learnt from the BFN experience. Section 4.2.3 Nutrition governance.
At the policy level, all countries established cross-sectoral national policy working groups which revised existing national legislation to identify entry points for the mainstreaming of biodiversity for food and nutrition and Bioversity International contributed to the writing and endorsement of the Voluntary Guidelines for Mainstreaming Biodiversity into Policies, Programmes and National and Regional Plans of Action on Nutrition in 2015 by the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (CGRFA)
Happy to contribute more at a later stage if needed.
More information can be found here:
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnut.2016.00014/full
IDF greatly appreciates the opportunity to comment on the CFS-HLPE DRAFT V0, Nutrition and food systems. We commend the members of the expert panel to draft this report on a very complex issue. The design and implementation of policies and systems for food and nutrition systems requires robust, comparative data over time and across countries, therefore there is a clear need to establish a global research network to collect, analyse, and synthesize data.
We have provided some comments in the document attached on the requested questions. However we do feel that some crucial parts of the report are missing in this zero draft. We would therefore request a second consultation round for all stakeholders to provide comments to the entire document.
Sincerely,
Laurence Rycken on behalf of the International Dairy Federation
Dear Chair, Panel Members and members of the project writing team,
Congratulations on the draft HLPE report on Nutrition and Food Systems. The draft is comprehensive and well written. Attached are a few comments for your consideration.
Best wishes,
Sheryl
Prof Sheryl Hendriks
Director: Institute for Food, Nutrition and Well-being
University of Pretoria
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