Experiencing the International Symposium In Sustainable Food Systems for Healthy Diets and Improved Nutrition
The FAO/WHO International Symposium on Sustainable Food Systems for Healthy Diets and Improved Nutrition was held in Rome, FAO headquarters, on December 1st-2nd 2016.
The International Symposium explored policies and programme options for shaping the food systems in ways that deliver foods for a healthy diet, focusing on concrete country experiences and challenges.
The target audience included government officials with policy-making and programme-design mandates from Agriculture, Nutrition, Health and other relevant sectors, as well as parliamentarians and non-state actors from civil society, private sector and research/academic institutions.
The symposium took a systems approach and concentrated on three main sub-themes:
Supply side policies and measures for increasing access to healthy diets. Demand side policies and measures for increasing access and empowering consumers to choose healthy diets. Measures to strengthen accountability, resilience, and equity within the food system.
It featured sessions to allow experts from different regions of the world to discuss for how to implement the recommended actions endorsed in the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2). In ICN2, Member States committed to: enhance sustainable food systems by developing coherent public policies from production to consumption across relevant sectors to provide year-round access to food that meets people’s nutrition needs and promote safe and diversified healthy diet.
Following the recommendation in the Rome Declaration, the United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition 2016-2025 was declared by the UN General Assembly in April 2016.
The Decade of Action creates an enabling political environment for turning commitments into action. However, for this to translate into actionable programmes, countries need additional technical support. Therefore, FAO and WHO held the International Symposium where practical solutions and successful country experiences in implementing sustainable food systems was shared. The Symposium was also an opportunity for participants to update the global community on those actions countries have taken for complying with ICN2 commitments.
The Symposium concluded that we need a rapid transformation in the Food Systems, by putting nutrition at the core of all policies, programmes making then nutrition sensitive across sectors including the public, private, media, civil society from production til consumption. This means that nutrition should be what guides the policies and not an outcome of the policies. Action should be aligned across sectors and settings.
This is where the FBDGs are crucial as a tool to guide policies to reach the country specific objectives in a appropriate cultural way and to align policies and programs across sectors. The FBDGs also encourage a multi-stakeholder approach which has been endorsed as a major facilitator for nutrition. The chair of the Symposium recommended that FBDGs should be the policy guide for both Supply and Demand side of the Food System as well functioning as a guide for Monitoring and Evaluation purposes.
In relation to my work in FAO on implementing the Food Based Dietary Guidelines, this was very encouraging and reinforcing the importance of the work we are doing. The keynote speaker Dr Patrick Webb declared that “Food dietary guidelines should not only educate consumers they need to direct policy makers in their decisions” (Patrick Webb)
