This webinar was organised with support from the European Union.

30 November 2016

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Speaker:

• Bernard Rey, Deputy Head of Unit – DEVCO C1 Rural Development, Food Security, Nutrition

Moderator:

• Luca Russo, Senior Food Crises Analyst and Strategic Adviser on resilience, FAO

Since 2014 the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission produced an annual report on food insecurity hotspots to allow informed based decisions on food crisis allocations at global level.

In 2016, to increase quality and transparency to the report, the European Union proposed to FAO and WFP to contribute to the JRC's annual report by providing food insecurity data and analysis. This joint process allowed the publication of a report with the logos of the two organizations together with the one of the EU.

Following the successful experience of the 2016 analysis, the three organizations discussed the opportunity to move forward, involving additional partners into the global assessment of the food crisis situation, with the aim of producing, from early 2017, a consensus-based yearly report.

The joint assessment of the food crisis situation is a step of a larger and more ambitious process. This is why the EU, WFP and FAO are jointly promoting the "Global Network against Food Crises", a platform for consensus building on technical analysis and coordination of response. For the EU this is part of the strategy to enhance effectiveness and impact in addressing food crises, since it is expected that the network would have the potential to act as a catalyzer for shared analysis of needs and the impact of current and future crises, with a view to facilitating coordination (including between humanitarian and development programming) in response to food and nutrition crises.

Large participation of stakeholders has been promoted by the network partners to increase the quality of the outcome as well as the credibility of the network. The network is not to replace but rather build on existing initiatives by bringing a global perspective as an added value. It will have the following functions: i) mobilize members’ efforts to avail the right level of technical expertise for the global analysis of food crises; ii) validate the overall findings of the analyses and related recommendations; iii) advocate and act as a platform to facilitate coordinated response programming; and iv) highlight the gaps in data availability then advocate for innovative data collection tools.

The webinar’s objectives are to inform technicians and resilience practitioners about the existence of the joint assessment and the global network; to get feedback on the usefulness of the report are received and feed into the process of establishment of the network itself; and to collect suggestions for improving the analysis, the communication shape and the focus to target audience (policymakers).