United Nations Food Systems Summit 2021

The Food Systems Summit 2021 aims to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by transforming the way the world produces, consumes, and thinks about food. The key objectives for the summit are;

• To generate significant action and measurable progress towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development 
• To raise awareness and elevate the public discussion about how to reform our food systems, develop principles to guide governments and other stakeholders looking to leverage their food systems to support the SDGs and
• To create a system of follow-up and review to ensure that the Summit’s outcomes continue to drive new actions and progress.

The summit will be guided by five Action Tracks below;

1. Ensure access to safe and nutritious food for all
2. Shift to sustainable consumption patterns 
3. Boost nature-positive production
4. Advance equitable livelihoods
5. Build resilience to vulnerabilities, shocks, and stress

Action Track 4: Advancing Equitable Livelihoods

CARE takes keen interest on Action Track 4; Advancing Equitable Livelihoods. CARE’s goal is to create inclusive and diverse food systems that contribute to the elimination of poverty, and food and nutrition insecurity by creating jobs, raising incomes across food value chains, protecting, and enhancing cultural and social capital, reducing risks for the poorest and increasing value distribution. Action Track 4 seeks to ensure that food systems ‘Leave No One Behind’ by addressing inequality as one of the root causes of poverty in all its forms; inequality in access to economic opportunities, gender inequality and inequality in access to productive resources and services that restrict the advancement of equitable livelihoods.

 At the United Nations Food Systems Summit 2021, CARE will take forward:

• An innovative set of inclusive, varied and gender-responsive solutions, which are respectful of diversity and indigenous knowledge, for the advancement of equitable livelihoods in food systems
• A critical mass of government, private sector, public sector, community-based entities, and other actors ready to announce significant commitments to act in line with these solutions.
• A global movement, with previously unheard voices, emerging to challenge inequity in food systems livelihoods and public, private, and voluntary sector bodies are responsive and supportive.

For equitable and just food system transformation we must adopt transdisciplinary, inclusive, and rights-based approaches. This implies that we should ensure integrated, participatory, rights-based approaches to governance and policymaking at all levels to address the structural inequities and power imbalances in food systems. The following key messages are suggested talking points that support CARE’s role as chair of Action Track 4: Advancing Equitable Livelihoods. They serve the purpose of supporting Summit Dialogue discussions and are not specific policy positions.

1. Strengthen the capacities, skills, and confidence of women, youth, and Indigenous peoples in food systems.
2. Demand policies place gender justice at the center for transformative change and increase investments into understanding, implementing, and strengthening equitable livelihoods.
3. Promote and uphold human rights as essential to delivering sustainable, equitable, and just food systems.
4. Recognize and account for all environmental, social, and health impacts and externalities of food system policies and practices to protect, restore, and manage ecosystems; and ensure food system transformations address climate risks and vulnerabilities.
5. Increase knowledge about nutritional needs by supporting nutrition-specific approaches that directly affect nutrition for women and children.
6. Advocate for policy change to guarantee food systems that respect workers rights to decent, just, and safe work; ensuring that youth, women, and Indigenous Peoples are protected from predatory labour practices.
7. Increase accessibility to quality technology and data for all participants in the food value chain, and ensure technological advances are inclusive of the needs of marginalized users.

Specific AT4 Goals to Advance Equitable Livelihoods

Equitable livelihoods requires building agency of the underrepresented those that lack the space or the enabling environment in which to exercise their power and rights. Advancing equitable livelihoods in food systems are nearly 500 million small-scale food producers who often work in fragile and vulnerable terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. The role and potential of the agricultural private sector also needs to be recognized and leveraged to improve equitable access to livelihoods. There is need to address the barriers that hamper access to financing for the private sector also need to be addressed. Increasing investment and access to finance is critical to achieving rural transformation, especially for small-scale food producers and rural micro, small and medium agri-food enterprises.