Act4Food Act4Change is a global youth-led movement promising to ignite a campaign action to combat hunger, improve health and heal the planet. The #Act4Food and #Act4Change campaign takes the form of a simple pledge and list of actions. The pledge brings together young people from around the world to focus on personal action and advocacy as a contribution to systemic change.
Healthy Diets for Tea Communities is a coalition led by the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and the Ethical Tea Partnership (ETP), with funding from with eight leading tea companies to address poor nutrition in tea supply chains in Assam (India), Kenya, and Malawi.
Dubbed a "Peoples Summit", it is open to unprecedented engagement in every country, from every sector, and every constituency. It is also dubbed a "Solutions Summit" with a focus on action. I lead one of the five thematic areas or "Action Tracks" (ATs) on "Ensuring access to safe and nutritious foods for all". There are four other ATs, a Science Group, a Champions Group, 4 cross-cutting Levers and the over 100 Summit Dialogues to date.
GAIN invested in the Marketplace for Nutritious Foods project as a model to support SMEs in the Agri-Food sector. The learning from this project creates an opportunity to GAIN and its partners to scale up and support more SMEs. Additionally, it is creates an opportunity to share with partners the successes, the challenges and improvements that can help future implementation better.
Our food systems profoundly impact our ability to achieve universal goals of human and planetary wellbeing, with food directly or indirectly linked to several of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals. With the UN Food Systems Summit scheduled to convene a wide group of stakeholders from all walks of life in September 2021, food systems are rising up the agenda.
Food Systems are the people, places, and activities that bring us food. They make food available in diverse ways that influence and shape the choices we make about what to eat, when, and how. They are complicated and constantly changing – comprising a host of moving and interconnected pieces. They support many people’s livelihoods.
Following opening remarks by the moderator, panelists will be invited to address the guiding questions (see below). Following these interventions, Member States, observers and civil society are encouraged to ask questions or raise issues in response to the interventions made.
The ambition of the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit is to launch a collective journey of transforming our food systems to give us the best possible chance of delivering on the 2030 agenda. Everyone has a role to play in this. Only by coming together and challenging one another we can spark new ideas and create meaningful impact.
Here comes the third wave. Like the first COVID-19 wave and the second wave, we cannot know in advance its peak, scale, or duration. I often think that things could have been different if we could have predicted the pandemic’s impact, but we were found to be ill-prepared. If we had relevant information and better disaster preparedness, we might all be living differently by now, I guess.
In the nine countries where GAIN works, lockdowns and border closures to mitigate the spread of the virus and the concurrent economic impact could greatly increase hunger. In some places, restrictions in movements and lay-offs would mean reduced accessibility to fresh produce and nutrient-rich animal-sourced foods, resulting in millions of people having to resort to less nutritious foods.
