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Nutrition experts from all over the world are coming together in Rome. They are not only distilling 2000 ideas to improve food systems - they are also preparing for the big UN summit in New York in September. Lawrence Haddad is executive director of the organisation GAIN and is leading one of the summit's action tracks. What needs to be done to ensure that this summit does not fail? An interview.
Mr. Haddad, what is your personal goal for the Pre-Summit?
For the Pre-Summit I want to see a coalition of action for zero hunger emerge. For the first time in history, we have a scientific roadmap on how to end hunger. For the first time we have the opportunity at the summit to make hunger reduction the job number one. You and me, we have the chance to be the first generation to end hunger.
Actually, hunger is increasing.
This is the first summit I can ever remember that brings together the people who are worried about climate, about biodiversity, livelihoods, resilience, nutrition and hunger. So, everyone has a role to play. In the past, hunger reduction would have been attempted without worrying too much about climate, for example. But this summit says: All these things are indivisible. And don’t think of them as a constraint but as enablers. It is necessary to decrease the climate footprint of agriculture for hunger reduction and in doing so it might make hugner reduction more effective. . Hence, the focused effort on hunger plus these described things gives me hope that we can look at hunger reduction in a really holistic way.
What is the summit’s progress so far?
It is very good. The summit is unlike others I have been involved in before. It is a very bottom-up summit. One part of it, the action tracks, are content generators, they develop the ideas with a wide variety of stakeholders, including government officials. And there are the summit dialogues, identifying national priorities and building the political momentum around them. The action tracks received over 2000 ideas, we have been developing, linking, clustering these ideas in the last nine months. It is going well! It is chaotic at times, but it is a good, creative chaos. It is the price to pay for getting tens of thousands of people involved and engaged.
The summit shall bring together the best ideas while also identifying priorities. What are these from the 2000 ideas?
First, we boiled them down to 200 so called game changing ideas. These will be clustered into several coalitions of action. Coalitions will align the priorities from the dialogues with the ideas from the action stracks and elsewhere. For example, we know that 20 or 30 countries have set so far hunger reduction as one of their priorities. And we have asked businesses to sign to a zero hunger business pledge, and we have a lot of civil society organizations interested in joining: all the big ones you would think about, but lots of unusual ones as well – and then the three Rome based agencies obviously as our north stars. All of these groups are coming together saying: We want to align our resources over the next years around ten high impact actions to end hunger. So, the coalition has a backbone with all these actions that the actors will coalesce around, bearing in mind their individual priorities. It is challenging to simplify all this, and we are trying to be inclusive but also focused.
Let’s have a look at your action track: What is the bigger problem – availability of nutritious food or inequities in access to food?
It is both. When we talk about nutritious food, we talk about vegetables, fruits, pulses, eggs, dairy and fish, nuts. And all these foods, on the supply side, all the incentives are stacked against these kinds of foods. Agricultural research development is really targeted at staple foods like cereals or potatoes. Government procurement of food for schools, social safety nets, for hospitals again are really focusing on staple food. And price subsidies are focused on staple foods, too. All of these strong government incentives need to shift to supply more nutritious food. But it is also about affordability.
Three billion people can’t afford a healthy diet.
That is shocking. Why is that? Because nutritious foods, first for all, are more unavailable. They are fresh, hence they are more perishable, more prone to spoilage. But we can’t lose them in the system, they are so important. Cool chains are too often underdeveloped in a lot of regions. So it is about making the supply greater, the affordability greater – and then we will work with action track 2 which focuses in how do we make the environment where consumers are coming into contact with their food more attractive for nutritious foods. A lot of retailers will have a special offer zone – for unhealthy foods. And a lot of government campaigns to make healthy food attractive are not very engaging. People are always asking: What is the one thing you want to achieve from food systems transformation? And I answer: Please stop asking me this question. Because it is a package all along the value chain! We have to think and act systemically.
What is the role of the private sector in this?
My view on the private sectors aims for balance. Some companies are part of the problem, but they need to be part of the solution. The food system is mostly made up of the private sector. Governments set the rules of the game and private sector is supposed to play within them. Hence, governments need to be more assertive about rules. And businesses need to be more proactive not because they are seen tob e doing good, but because it is good for their business. The consumer trend we are seeing is gathering pace and is unstoppable, it will not be put back in the box: Consumers want healthier food and with a lower environmental footprint and, more importantly perhaps even than that, investors in businesses want to see this as well.
Can public-private partnerships close existing funding gap?
They have to. You can do these partnerships well or you can do them terribly. It is just a question of governance. They function best, when they have a very clear goal and everyone shares that goal. They also will have a governance structure that means that no one can do anything that is not in the partnership and they report the results of the partnership publicly. It is very simple conceptually to do them. It gets difficult when you get into the weeds. The private sector dwarfs the public sector. The public sector investment that is needed to end hunger is doubling current levels: from 33 billion dollars a year, that is currently spent, to 66 billion a year. The value of the stock market of the world’s top ten wealthy people increased by more than 33 billion just in one year. We have to find a way to unlock that private resource to make it work harder for the things that we all care about.
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