With a year to go, the Summit will offer a platform like no other to bring together key players from the worlds of government, science, business, policy, and academia, as well as farmers, indigenous people, youth organisations, consumer groups, environmental activists, and other key stakeholders.
In meaningful engagement with all such stakeholders, GAIN’s footprint will be well present throughout the various Summit Action Tracks with GAIN’s Executive Director Dr Lawrence Haddad, chairing Action Track 1.
He will also join GAIN’s Chair Catherine Bertini in the Champions Group. GAIN’s Director of Knowledge Leadership Dr Lynnette Neufeld is a member of the Science Group while GAIN Board Member Dr Joachim von Braun will chair the Science Group with another Board member, Dr. Kaosar Afsana, serving as one of the Science Group’s Vice Chairs. Here is Haddad’s take on the announcement today.
I am very honoured to be asked by the UN Special Envoy Agnes Kalibata to Chair Action Track 1 of the UN Food Systems Summit: Ensuring Access to Safe and Nutritious Food for All. This is an issue I care deeply about. I wake up every day worrying about people not being able to get enough food to eat, or not enough of the right foods to eat, or consuming too many unhealthy foods. The recent SOFI report told us that the number of people unable to afford a healthy diet is a staggering 3 billion. This is an outrage. It puts SDG 2 and all the other global sustainable development goals at risk. This is wholly unacceptable.
By 2030 we need to make widespread hunger and malnutrition old news by changing the goals of our food systems and transforming the incentives to realise those goals. By working together, standing side by side, within and across nations, we can do it. We have to. The toll on human lives is too great. The missed opportunities for human greatness are unthinkable.
Find out more about the Food System Summit 2021 and follow all the updates.
Action Track 1, like all the Action Tracks, will be inclusive. The Action Track team will work together with Dr. Kalibata and the Summit Secretariat team, with the other Action Tracks, with the FAO and other UN Agencies, with the Member States, with the Champions Group and with the Science Committee. We will listen to, draw in, and share back the ideas of thousands of people from all walks of life in all corners of the world to identify evidence-informed, game changing, country driven actions. My colleagues at GAIN will support me and others in this important work.
I want to be able to look back on from 2030 and say that the Food System Summit of 2021 will forever be remembered as the moment the world reset and began to transform its food systems.
The actions that are identified will not only help ensure access to safe nutritious food for all, but they will contribute to the climate, environmental, gender, livelihood and resilience goals of the Summit. We can no longer choose to only work on one goal or another: like human rights, food system goals are indivisible.
I want to be able to look back on from 2030 and say that the Food System Summit of 2021 will forever be remembered as the moment the world reset and began to transform its food systems. It was the start of the movement that brought a wide range of people, organisations and countries together to make food systems the unambiguous and irresistible force for good they are today.