The UN Food Systems Summit: How Not to Respond to the Urgency of Reform

At a critical juncture on the road to the UN Food Systems Summit, three UN rights experts warn that it will fail to be a 'people's summit' unless it is urgently rethought.By Michael Fakhri, Hilal Elver and Olivier De SchutterNEW YORK, Mar 22 2021 (IPS) Global food systems have been failing most people for a long time, and the COVID-19 pandemic has made a critical situation even worse. 265 million people are threatened by famine, up 50% on last year; 700 million suffer from chronic hunger; and 2 billion more from malnutrition, with obesity and associated diet-related diseases increasing in all world regions. Michael FakhriEveryone agrees that we need urgent solutions and action. The convening of this year’s UN Food Systems Summit by Secretary General António Guterres was therefore welcome. However, as we move towards critical junctures on the road to the Summit, we remain deeply concerned that this ‘people’s summit’ will fail the people it claims to be serving. After more than a year of deliberations, the Summit participants will meet this October in New York to present “principles to guide governments and other stakeholders looking to leverage their food systems” to support the Sustainable Development Goals. We will be told that the outcomes have been endorsed by the civil society groups who took part, with ‘solutions’ crowd-sourced from tens of thousands of people around the world. And if other solutions are not there, we will be told that this is because t...
Source: IPS Inter Press Service - Health - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Tags: Aid Civil Society Food & Agriculture Food Security and Nutrition Food Sustainability Global Headlines Health Human Rights Humanitarian Emergencies Poverty & SDGs TerraViva United Nations Source Type: news