Regional Multi-Stakeholder Food and Nutrition Security Policy Dialogue
Summary
Theme: Enhancing Climate Resilience and Food and Nutrition Security
Aim: To provide a platform for multi-stakeholder dialogue on food, agriculture and natural resources (FANR), focusing on the need for resilience of the agriculture sector in the face of climate change and related risks, and addressing the challenges of malnutrition.
Objective: To convene a multi-actor policy dialogue to deliberate on various thematic areas, with a view to generating recommendations aimed at policy makers to transform African agriculture.
Stakeholders: The policy dialogue will bring together state and non-state actors, to include policy research institutions, universities, farmer organisations, agri-business, agricultural financiers, civil society, policy makers, oversight bodies and the media.
Date: 5 – 7 November 2019
Venue: Kigali, Rwanda
Duration: 3 days
Background
Addressing the challenges of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all its forms is a prominent feature of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda. SDG targets 2.1 and 2.2 focus on ensuring access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food for all, and eliminating all forms of malnutrition, respectively. However, current evidence is showing a rise in world hunger, where the number of people suffering from hunger has been growing over the past three years, returning to levels from a decade ago. Today, there are 821 million undernourished people in the world, an increase of 36.4 million from 2015. Of these, 257 million are in Africa, of whom 237 million are in sub-Saharan Africa. At the regional level, although the prevalence of stunting in children under five is falling, only a few countries are on track to meet the global nutrition target for stunting. In northern and southern Africa, the incidence of overweight in children under the age of five continues to rise. Given this background, Africa is not on track to meeting the SDG 2 targets, and without increased efforts, the continent risks failing to eradicate hunger by 2030.
Climate change and variability threaten to erode and reverse the gains made in ending hunger and malnutrition. Climate change is a present and growing threat to food and nutrition security in Africa, and more so to the economies of countries that are heavily reliant on agriculture. Currently, whilst there is some spatial diversity, reduced precipitation and higher temperatures are already impacting negatively on the yields of staple food crops. It is estimated that by 2050, an additional 71 million people globally will become food insecure as a result of the impacts of climate change, with over half of them being in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).
The deterioration of the food and nutrition security situation in Africa, and the lack of progress towards World Health Assembly (WHA) global nutrition targets, make it imperative for countries to step up their efforts. If countries are to achieve a world without hunger and malnutrition by 2030, there is need for greater and combined efforts from all governments and their development partners. The need for a heightened sense of urgency and renewed commitment can also be seen from the findings of the inaugural biennial review of countries’ progress towards implementation of the Malabo Declaration commitments. The inaugural results illustrated a positive correlation between a country’s performance and its commitment to the values and principles of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). Those countries that are dedicated and committed to the implementation of their National Agriculture Investment Plans performed better. It is, therefore, imperative to strengthen country commitments to the CAADP, and to accelerate efforts towards formulating and implementing national and regional agricultural investment plans.
Climate resilience is key and must be built around climate risk assessments, science, proven technologies, and cross-sectoral collaboration. Greater action is required to strengthen and/or build institutional capacity for risk monitoring and early warning systems; emergency preparedness and response; vulnerability reduction measures; shock-responsive and long-term social protection; and planning and implementation of resilience-building measures. Africa lags in developing and implementing climate adaptation and mitigation strategies. Greater efforts are needed in data collection, monitoring and implementation of climate-smart agriculture practices. Continued efforts, through partnerships, blending climate change adaptation, mitigation and disaster risk reduction, and long-term financing, are needed to bridge humanitarian and development approaches. In addition, actions across sectors must be scaled up to achieve greater resilience to climate variability and extremes.
Policy Dialogue Format and Objectives
The three-day policy dialogue will provide a platform to bring together decision-makers and food, agriculture and natural resources stakeholders, to share knowledge and experiences and develop action plans to translate evidence to practice.
The specific objectives of the policy dialogues are to engage diverse stakeholders in a discussion to identify good practice, lessons learned, emerging opportunities, critical gaps and challenges at the implementation level, as well as discussing the broader national, regional and global policy implications of building resilience and improving food and nutrition security.
The Policy Dialogue program will feature plenary sessions, theme-based break-away sessions, partner-led side events, and launches. A Knowledge Fair will run alongside the policy dialogue in order to facilitate informal interaction, learning, and collaboration among participants. The Knowledge Fair will feature exhibition booths for showcasing posters, videos and publications of best practices from partners, and exploring the application of creative communication tools such as Theatre for Policy Advocacy (TPA). The dialogue will provide time and space for informal discussion groups, enabling participants to fully engage. Social media, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, will form part of the communications strategy to promote the dialogue as well as disseminate proceedings and outcomes.
Session Themes
This dialogue provides an appropriate platform for stakeholders to engage and develop strategies, programmes and policies aimed at promoting CSA value chains (adaptation, mitigation and resilience), and how agriculture can deliver positive nutritional outcomes. As cross-cutting issues, the dialogue will also attend to the need for a conducive policy environment, and the mobilization of investments required to achieve the desired agricultural transformation. Towards this, the following suggested session themes will be considered.
1. Climate Smart Agriculture Sub-Themes
a. Linking early warning systems to response mechanisms
Whilst agricultural development is fundamental to achieving many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the African Union’s Agenda 2063, and commitments under the Malabo Declaration, agricultural productivity on the continent remains low. Africa’s smallholder farmers are more vulnerable to climate change-related environmental shocks, ecosystem degradation and other natural disasters. This is amplified by smallholder farmers’ poverty, against a background of restricted access to appropriate inputs and reliable markets; crop and livestock protection mechanisms, and technological enablers; information and extension advisory services; land for cultivation; and infrastructure challenges. Whilst there is a wealth of vulnerability data at national and regional levels, this unfortunately does not filter to smallholders who are at the receiving end of the climate-related shocks and disasters. Capping this bleak scenario are policies that, in most instances, are reactive, and do not address the interests of smallholder farmers on issues such as infrastructure and trade barriers, and their impact on the transformation and growth of the agriculture sector.
b. Supporting climate change adaptation decisions through scenario planning
The absence of precise data on climate change and variability inhibits the development of a defined and comprehensive future scenario, and compromises the development of targeted responses, thus putting at risk the environment and the ecosystems; world economy and development; food and nutrition security; and more broadly, stability and security. The focus of current efforts is narrow, based on traditional climate related impacts, thus limiting the ability of decision-makers to effectively and appropriately prepare for the projected change in climate. There is need for climate scientists and adaptation specialists to be able to accurately project likely changes in climate and their consequent effects on resources and facilities. However, projecting future climate scenarios always has a degree of uncertainty. To this end, scenario planning (SP), a technique that recognizes the limits of projections, acknowledges deep uncertainty, and has the potential to help decision makers to prepare for future conditions outside currently observed trends, is appropriate.
c. Fostering investment for scaling up climate smart agriculture
Evidence of successful scaling approaches to climate-resilient agriculture has been identified as a major factor in influencing investment decisions. Securing investment for scaling climate-resilient agriculture will require innovative approaches to developing, communicating and pitching investment proposals that are in support of national investment priorities, and are guided by community-based adaptation and regional scenarios developed through participatory approaches. The envisaged investment proposals need to be supported by enabling policies, institutional arrangements and the participation of non-state actors.
d. Equity and community management in smallholder irrigation schemes
Feeding the population of SSA in 2050 without relying on imports will require agriculture to be more productive. Whilst irrigation is a potential solution to this challenge, currently, only around 6% of the region’s cultivated land is irrigated. This is despite the availability of water to irrigate larger areas. However, as a result of persistent food and nutrition insecurity, there is a resurgence of interest in irrigation, as part of the continent’s agricultural transformation agenda. To achieve this, there is need to promote on-farm water efficient technologies and ensure appropriate regulation and collective action to address water and environmental management issues at community level.
e. Creating opportunities for mitigation
Mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can lessen the extent of climate change and future needs for adaptation. The intended nationally determined contributions (NDCs) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) seek to compel countries to commit to specific reductions of GHG emissions. There is a need to understand the existing legal framework and its implications on Africa’s effective implementation of the agricultural NDCs. For SSA, agriculture will be the most affected, and yet its livestock sector is one of the biggest GHG contributors, with an estimated 14.5 percent of all anthropogenic GHG emissions globally. There is a need for the development of mitigation pathways to ensure low emission livestock systems. Further, the contribution of forests to mitigation of climate change is fundamental and needs to be promoted as part of ecosystem services.
2. Agriculture - Nutrition Nexus Sub-Themes
a. Maximizing the nutritional impacts of agricultural development programmes
Africa urgently requires a deliberate effort to ensure that agriculture programmes generate nutritional outcomes that benefit smallholder farm families, particularly women of child-bearing age and children. There is need to develop the most appropriate methods for designing, implementing and monitoring and evaluating nutrition-sensitive interventions for use in various contexts, and to identify potential agricultural investments where nutrition-sensitive interventions can be integrated to scale. FANRPAN and partners will share practical experiences on how to make agriculture deliver on nutrition.
b. Alternative approaches to delivering nutrition
The global population has become largely dependent on animal source foods for proteins and some micronutrients, with per capita meat consumption increasing by approximately 20 kilograms since 1961, to average 43 kilograms per person in recent years. This increase in consumption means total meat production has been growing at a faster rate than population growth. Against a growing global population, estimated to reach 11,2 billion by the turn of the century, the reliance on livestock as a source of proteins will be unsustainable, and will be exacerbated by the resources (water and feed) required to develop them, as well as livestock’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). For example, the Institute of Mechanical Engineers (UK) estimates that over 15,000 litres of water is required to produce a kilogram of beef, and that cattle are some of the leading contributors of GHGs. With the projected impacts of climate change and variability, especially on water, there is an urgent need to focus research on alternative approaches to ensuring sufficient animal source foods for the global population. The exploration of beneficial insects and worms (for food, stockfeeds, soil fertility and waste management); and neglected plant species provides an opportunity with potential for complementing future diets, as well as generating employment.
c. Support to on-farm and post-harvest loss management
In SSA, an average of 20% of food, estimated to be worth $4 billion per year is lost at storage (FAO, 2011). This food loss can feed up to 48 million people (FAO, 2013). Losses on cereals are high, accounting for about 25% of the total crop harvested, a situation that calls for a high sense of urgency. In response to the heavy losses, a wide array of modern and improved post-harvest loss management (PHLM) technologies have been introduced to smallholder farmers through the combined efforts of public, private and civil society sector actors. In spite of the different interventions and promotion, the adoption rates for PHLM technologies remain sub-optimal for various reasons. There is need for coordinated and centrally-driven policies, business models and approaches to ensure comprehensive strategies are designed and implemented to address the challenges associated with post-harvest food losses, and ultimately, their impact on nutrition.
d. Creating a conducive policy environment to enable agriculture markets work for poor rural farming households
In SSA, smallholder farming has become a poverty trap as a result of the failure of the markets to work for the poor. Markets are important for smallholder farming households, serving as a link between the local, national and global economies. The way markets function will determine the rate and pattern of growth, and consequently, the speed and extent of poverty reduction. There is need to ensure gender sensitive market systems, characterised by competition and lower costs of doing business, thus providing incentives for trade and investment.
Expected Outcomes
The most important outcomes from this dialogue will include firm resolutions from a multi-stakeholder and multi-sectoral base, with recommendations for building resilience in the face of climate change, and guaranteeing the nutritional outcomes from agricultural interventions. The dialogue resolutions will set the stage for advocacy engagements aimed at national and regional policy makers. Apart from the resolutions, the Policy Dialogue will produce a number of outputs, including research papers, policy briefs, dialogue proceedings, virtual knowledge exchange, and information and knowledge products, including videos and presentations. Overall, the content from the different theme-based sessions will facilitate a better stakeholder understanding of how to effectively build resilience for food and nutrition security in the face of climate change. By bringing stakeholders from different walks of life, the dialogue will create a network for cross‐sectoral interface and information sharing and action.
