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November 13th, 2018

Policies that strengthen the nexus between food, health, ecology, livelihoods and identities

Published by Civil Society Reflection Group on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,

This article (PDF), by the Civil Society Reflection Group on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development explores the connection between food, health, ecology, livelihoods and identities and offers feasible pathways on how to place the virtuous interplay between sustainable and diversified local food systems and healthy diets at the core of the public policy agenda. The article argues that to address multiple intertwined challenges, the focus should be on ‘The Peasant Food Web’, made up of small-scale producers, often family or women-led. The Web is less wasteful, nurtures diversity, degrades environmental and social harm, compared to the Industrial Food Chain; the links running from production inputs to consumers. Furthermore, a paradigm shift towards diversified agroecological systems is needed, developed on the basis of peasants’ knowledge and experimentation, and through farmer-researcher participatory approaches. For this, institutional and policy barriers must be removed. The articles comes with 10 action pathways. One is to strengthen the role of producers’ organizations in policy-making and build inclusive, interdisciplinary, rights-based policy spaces with robust safeguards against conflicts of interest. Moreover, the rights to freely save, plant, exchange, sell and breed seeds and livestock and remove regulations blocking local markets and diversity should be restored. Unfortunately, there are three emerging obstacles to system change: dematerialization, digitalization and financialization of food systems. They are profoundly changing the nature of both tradable goods and the markets where these are exchanged. While technology and resources can definitely help, the fundamental challenge is one of devising policies and regulations that progressively but  unambiguously reorient the production model and realign it with the imperatives of sustainable development. The redesign, or creation, of legitimate institutional policy spaces that can address the common roots of the different development challenges, rather than treating the symptoms of the problems in well-established silos is required

This article is part of the book ‘Spotlight on sustainable development 2018: Exploring new policy pathways‘ (PDF)

Curated from 2030spotlight.org