Global Food Security Summit 2023
Today the UK hosts the Global Food Security Summit which highlights the food crisis and lays out actions needed to reach SDG2: zero hunger and malnutrition.
It’s clear to see that our global food system is broken. The current structure rewards profit at the expense of sustainability and leads to gross inequality. Considerations like food safety, nutrition, access and the environment often fall by the wayside.
This is an issue for everyone: take the 9.3 million adults in the UK who experienced food insecurity in January 2023; or – as reported by the FAO– the 1 in 4 people (28.5%) in East Africa who were undernourished in 2022. The inability to meet minimum food consumption or nutritional needs affects children’s growth and mortality rates. With the climate crisis making extreme weather more likely, we must work together to create a food system that is the most resilient it can be, not just the most profitable. Agriculture must be centered around meeting the nutritional needs of our global population; for now and the future.
A food-based approach to agricultural development that puts nutritionally rich foods and dietary diversity at the heart of overcoming undernutrition, overnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies.
DownloadWhat does resilience look like?
Food sovereignty is in some ways the opposite of the food system we
currently have. It means people (farmers, consumers and producers) have the
right to control the various aspects of the food supply chain/system which they
are part of. When people are able to make decisions about what to produce, eat
and sell – they, and the food system, become more resilient. Communities in
rural Africa are often most affected by hunger and poverty precisely because
they are not contributing to decision-making in the food system, despite their
livelihoods being dependent upon it. Because of this, many smallholder farmers
feel powerless.
The incredible change
we’re making in our projects we use a range of interventions to encourage local
food systems to thrive. Before we work with farmers, many of them are dependent
on expensive ‘inputs’ such as hybrid seeds, pesticides and fertilizers. These
must be bought from large corporations, so when cash flow is a problem,
harvests suffer.
When farmers have nothing to harvest, they buy low-nutrition, processed foods made by large food processing companies. It’s a cycle of disempowerment. In our projects we aim to restore decision making, power and freedom to small producers, sellers and consumers through supporting self-reliance, building on local knowledge and strengthening local enterprises and markets, to improve resilience.
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