Policy Support and Governance Gateway
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Nutrition and Food Systems

Malnutrition affects all countries and one in three people. It takes many forms, from chronic hunger, to micronutrient deficiency, and from child stunting to obesity.

Malnutrition also increases vulnerability to infections such as the COVID-19. While no foods or dietary supplements can prevent COVID-19 infection, maintaining a healthy diet is an important part of supporting a strong immune system.

Working across food systems - how we produce, collect, store, transport, transform and ensure access to foods - we can enable better nutrition, and improve our health and use of natural resources.

FAO partners with governments to strengthen food systems for better nutrition and health, working not only with the ministries of agriculture and health, but also with social welfare, education, trade and industry, finance and others. FAO also facilitates high-level dialogue between governments and their partners to develop common norms and approaches for sustainable food systems and healthy diets.

Key policy messages

·        Profound changes in our current food systems and consumption patterns are needed in order to combat nutrition problems that afflict more than 2 billion people, particularly in developing countries.  Today, healthy diets are unaffordable for more than 3 billion people, a problem likely to have been exacerbated by COVID-19. Preserving access to safe, diverse nutritious food is an essential part of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly for poor and vulnerable communities, who are hit hardest by the pandemic and its resulting economic shocks.

·        Malnutrition costs the world’s economies trillions of dollars due to higher healthcare costs and loss of productivity. Investing in nutrition is thus both a moral imperative and a sound economic investment.

·        A food system's approach to addressing malnutrition requires comprehensive programmes and coherent public policies that address both the supply and demand sides of food, as well as the food environment where consumers engage with a food system to make their food-related decisions. Policies, programmes and investments need to be “nutrition-sensitive”, which means nutrition must be mainstreamed across sectoral policies.

·        Examples of food system policy measures that support healthy diets are: incentives to encourage the production of nutrient-rich foods like fruit and vegetables, investing in transport and cold-chain infrastructure to reduce food loss, food reformulation laws, regulations for retail and food service chains, food labelling policies and legislation to ensure institutional procurement from local smallholder farmers, where possible. 

·        The United Nation’s Decade of Action on Nutrition (2016-2025) is an unprecedented opportunity for countries and their partners to not only commit to nutrition objectives, but also to also act upon these commitments, by intensifying their efforts and scaling up nutrition investments, to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target of ending malnutrition in all its forms by 2030.

·        FAO’s mission includes tackling malnutrition in all its forms by supporting countries in accelerating impactful policies and actions across agrifood systems, to ensure affordable healthy diets for all. The FAO Strategic Framework 2022-31 outlines the Organization’s commitment to more efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable agrifood systems, for better production, better nutrition, a better environment, and a better life, leaving no one behind. An agrifood systems transformation can only be achieved by capitalizing on knowledge, experience, and skills from a broad range of public and private actors with different needs and capacities. As this will involve significant governance challenges, FAO supports member countries to balance different actors’ needs, for instance, by supporting the creation of coalitions of actors.

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