ROME/NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 23 – Faced with a world in which the COVID 19 pandemic and the recession have pushed nearly 100 million people into extreme poverty, bringing the total number of hungry to 730 million, “it is necessary promote healthy diets that safeguard traditional food cultures and be aware that there are no ‘one size fits all’ solution”, the Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi said in a video-address to the first-ever UN Food Systems Summit convened by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres during the 76th General Assembly.
“When Secretary General Guterres launched the idea of this Summit in 2019, malnutrition was already on the rise. Today, this plight has become even more dramatic,” Draghi said. According to the latest data, almost one in ten people in the world is undernourished: “The pandemic and the global downturn have pushed nearly 100 million people into extreme poverty, bringing the total to 730 million. Climate change has increased the risk of droughts, floods and extreme weather events, which affect the agricultural sector disproportionately.
Changes in precipitation patterns and heat waves have reduced crop yields and land productivity. The combined effect of health crises, economic instability, and climate change has the potential to undermine our collective efforts to fight hunger globally”, warned the Italian Prime Minister.
The summit saw nearly 300 commitments from hundreds of thousands of people from around the world and across all constituencies to accelerate action and to transform food systems. Italy, said Draghi, is fully committed to promoting sustainable and resilient food systems, both at the national level and as G20 Presidency. “At the G20 Ministerial Meeting in Matera in June, we signed the ‘Matera Declaration’. It calls upon the international community to ensure adequate nutrition for all and set up resilient food chains, to reach the goal of zero hunger in 2030. The Food Coalition that Italy and the Food and Agriculture Organisation promoted last year has exactly that same goal. We want to trigger coordinated action globally on food security and nutrition in response to Covid-19”.
The first ever UN Food Summit was opened by Guterres, who proposed a transformation in food systems to reduce not only hunger, but also malnutrition-related diseases and damage to climate and environment. Current food systems “generate one-third of greenhouse gas emissions”, but it is time to stop “waging war on our planet”, said the Secretary-General, calling for the adoption of “sustainable consumption and production methods and nature-based solutions”.
The convened world leaders in an effort to spur national and regional action to deliver the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through transforming food systems. Among the goals for 2030 are zero hunger, zero poverty, gender equality and climate action. Following from the latest IPCC report, which raised a “code red” for human-driven global heating, the United States, one of the world’s major agricultural producers, pledged $10 billion over five years to address climate change and help feed those most vulnerable without exhausting natural resources. Half of these funds will be invested domestically in “recognition that all countries, even those that produce a surplus of food, must take steps to improve nutrition and adapt their food systems to a changing climate.”
The summit was boycotted by hundreds of civil society organizations, academics and social movements, as well as groups representing thousands of small-scale farmers and indigenous communities who produce 70% of the world’s food through sustainable agriculture: in their view, the summit agenda was conditioned by an opaque network of corporate interests that now control nearly the entire production and distribution chain. (@OnuItalia)
