In September 2021, UN Secretary-General António Guterres convened a Food Systems Summit as part of the Decade of Action to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. Presidents, Prime Ministers and other Heads of State attended the Summit, with the aim of agreeing to and launching bold new actions to deliver progress on all 17 SDGs, each of which relies to some degree on healthier, more sustainable and equitable food systems.
The Summit tried to move away from looking only at food production to a more integrated view that also includes food consumption, processing and distribution, food marketing and trade, impacts on the environment, and fairness to small and large farmers alike. The assumption is that the way toward sustainability in the food system in the world is to look at the full life cycle of food, innovative opportunities and root causes of challenges we face.
A coalition of IYRP supporting organisations submitted a Game Changing Idea “Valuing rangeland variability: a global initiative for mobile pastoralism” and organised a parallel (affiliated session) at the Pre-Summit on 26 July 2021 – see the full report and the recording in the links below.
See also the one-pager on the relationship between the UNFSS and the IYRP, with embedded links to key documents online.
