High-Level Dialogues Series 2:
Human Health and Resilient Food Systems
Friday 3 July | 3:00pm CEST
The COVID-19 pandemic is a global humanitarian and economic crisis that has also exacerbated the stress on global food systems. Essential measures to limit the spread of the disease have inevitably had an impact on the movement of people and products. But even before the pandemic, global food systems were faced with a formidable array of challenges that need to be addressed simultaneously: providing food security and nutrition to a growing global population; ensuring the livelihoods of millions of people working along the food chain from farm to fork; and ensuring the environmental sustainability of the sector.
With the world’s population projected to reach almost 10 billion in 2050, a significant increase in the production of affordable, healthy and nutritious food is required, along with a close examination of consumer food choices to improve health and well-being through balanced diets. At the same time, global food systems are not only dependent upon sustainable natural resources, but are also responsible for the vast majority of global land and water use, place significant pressure on biodiversity and ecosystems, and are an important source of greenhouse gas emissions.
How food systems absorb, recover, adapt and transform in response to the dramatic short-term shock of COVID-19 will shape their level of resilience and their ability to deliver on the longer-term challenges. In general, countries’ policies in this regard remain weak in overall terms. Investments are desperately needed to improve the resilience of food systems, not just in relation to COVID-19, but also to the multitude of shocks that can affect the food system from health, climate and other environmental emergencies. Critically, there is a need to ensure that short-term response measures during the crisis reinforce, rather than undermine, long-term goals of resilient, sustainable and productive global food systems.
The objective in this dialogue is to explore this complex web of issues through an interactive discussion with a number of high-level experts. The key question confronting the panel is “How can recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic help shift the global food system towards greater resilience and more healthy and nutritious diets for a growing population, while ensuring sustainable livelihoods and reducing environmental impacts?”
Join OECD, WWF, EDF and the World Bank for next high-level dialogue in the Green and Healthy Recovery series.