Key issues for Sustainable Food Systems and Climate Action raised at the IFIAD 2021 Annual Conference

The IFIAD 2021 Annual conference took place virtually on the 20^th of October with a provisional theme of “A year of action: food and climate tackling agricultural food systems to COP26 and beyond”. The conference’s key concern involves the significance of agricultural food systems being featured in the decision-making at COP26.

The Minister of State responsible for land use and biodiversity at the Department of Agriculture Food and the Marine Pippa Hackett mentioned the importance of involving farmers from the onset of planning for environmental conservation and conserving biodiversity for the transformation of food systems, gaining support from the national and international level is essential for the transformation of food systems.

The key issues raised in the IFIAD 2021 annual conference included the importance of an effective system approach that considers different trade-offs in order to achieve sustainable food systems; inclusive national dialogue where farmers are involved in the decision making; strong political decision-making system that should be applied when countries are facing problems; the importance of actors involved in food systems to have trust. Transparent decision-making at the selection criteria of the decision-making bodies is one way to gain trust in all those involved in the food systems another way involves formal mediation processes to ease potential disagreements and reach an agreement of ways to achieve sustainability. The formal mediation processes should include a neutral and balanced view between all decision-makers.

Smallholder farmers are perceived high risks by investors which pose a challenge for accessing funding such as investments and even loans as well as adaptation to climate change since these farmers do not have sufficient funding for climate adaptation. Government approaches and response to climate change need to be tailor-made for smallholder farmers so that it fits their scenery. To integrate climate change effectively farmers’ adoption of climate change has to involve mitigation and the solution to climate change should involve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The challenge of how the private sector, as well as civil society of indigenous groups and the gender groups, can be brought together to work together because the private sector plays an essential in food systems and global trade

Translating food systems transformation into practice is an important issue because emphasis needs to be made on shorter supply chains on local food systems and this cannot be done in the absence of a global trade system. Commitments to the transformation of the sustainability of the food system should be transformed into action. All people nationally and globally should be included in this transformation.

The disagreement between the science groups during the food systems summit was another area of lack of consensus as these groups wanted to dominate instead of uniting people and providing evidence for the need to transform agricultural food systems. Self-regulation by industry is not an option as a pathway towards sustainability and to avoid the power of banks driving solutions for farmers, finance should be spent wisely and not rely on private sector investments, and this statement. It was discussed that the private sector is essential for the food systems however some parts of it are not regulated and that alone doesn’t make it ideal for some civil society to depend entirely on it.

Source: FPA 2018 header press release website

Key issues of the food systems summit that were not discussed at the IFIAD 2021 annual conference include the boosting nature-based solution which involved a multi-stakeholder commitment to action in the agroecology initiative which basically involved restoring the degraded land and soils to transform the food systems and conserving agricultural ecology to combat the loss of biodiversity. Key Issues for COP26 include the issue of adaption to protect communities and natural habitats to protect and restore ecosystems, build defenses, warning systems, and resilient infrastructure and agriculture to avoid loss of homes, livelihoods, and even lives.