Ruben Echeverría, HLPE-FSN Steering Committee member, delivers expert presentation to CFS Collaborative Governance Dialogue on Financing Food Security and Nutrition
©FAO/HLPE-FSN Silvia Meiattini
How can the world finance food security and nutrition? This was the guiding question of the Collaborative Governance Dialogue on Financing for Food Security and Nutrition (FSN), held by the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) on 15 April at FAO headquarters in Rome.
The event, part of the CFS’s Multi-Year Programme of Work (MYPoW) 2024-2027, contributed to the reflection on financing sustainable and inclusive food systems, “that are not just capable of ending hunger and malnutrition, but simultaneously eradicate poverty, reduce inequalities in all their dimensions, and deliver on climate, biodiversity, soils and the rest of the SDGs.” Mobilizing more and better financing to reach these goals will require collaboration between the public and private sectors, governments and financial institutions at all scales, international and local development agencies, and other food systems actors.
To contribute to this discussion, and guide the CFS’s engagement, the event agenda set the scene in framing issues in financing for food with global and country-level insights, before exploring potential solutions from the perspective of CFS stakeholder groups.
The event was moderated by Maryam Rahmanian, independent expert on food systems, and opened with expert presentations to contextualize the issue, delivered by Jim Woodhill, from the Global Donor Platform for Rural Development (GDPRD), and Ruben Echeverría, member of the Steering Committee of the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE-FSN).
Elaborating on research conducted by the HLPE-FSN for the upcoming note on strengthening responsible finance for food security and nutrition, Ruben Echeverría highlighted the complexities of the financing architecture and the role that the CFS can play in coordinating across the range of diverse actors involved.
Echeverría underscored the potential contribution of the CFS to meeting the urgency of these challenges. “It is clear from the size, complexity and scale of the problem that there is a great need for coordinated, timely action to properly finance food security and nutrition. As an intergovernmental and multistakeholder platform, the CFS has a unique role in this arena”.
One of the key challenges in financing food security and nutrition is agreeing on the status quo: there is no definitive answer for the cost of ending hunger, nor for the total volume of flows to food systems.
As a sign of how divergent calculations are, estimates for the cost of ending hunger range from USD 7 billion a year to USD 1.3 trillion a year, as illustrated in the graph below, based on information from different sources. As Echeverría explained, “arriving at a common figure for the financing gap is a complicated task…[but] agreeing on the baseline size and scope of the challenge is a prerequisite for successfully mobilizing the required resources”.
Another crucial issue is targeting finance where it is most impactful. The majority of financial flows to food systems come from private sources – such as foreign direct investment (FDI), food systems’ actors (farmers, small businesses, and agribusiness), or financial institutions. These private investments are typically designed for economic returns and may not address the social and environmental outcomes targeted by development aid or climate finance. Echeverría’s intervention highlighted how targeting financial flows towards desired outcomes – particularly by leveraging development funding to mainstream food security and nutrition – is crucial to achieving food security even with constrained resources.
Finally, Echeverría stressed the opportunities: “Timely, responsible investments in FSN make economic sense” as they contribute to GDP growth, generate business opportunities, and lower the costs of unsustainable and unhealthy food systems.
Following the scene setting presentations, CFS Stakeholder groups were invited to share experiences of the challenges in mobilizing finance for FSN. The audience heard case studies from Colombia and Yemen, highlighting how national contexts affect financing policy.
Germán Guerrero, Technical Secretary at the National Commission for Agricultural Credit in Colombia, emphasized that the agricultural sector is a driving force behind recent national GDP growth, but that strong policy is required to ensure financial inclusion of rural smallholders.
Meanwhile, the challenges of financing FSN in fragile contexts were highlighted by Ahmed Saeed Abdo Al-Wahsh – Technical Advisor for the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Fisheries, Yemen – who underscored the immediate financing needs in the country, exacerbated by climate change and conflict driving acute food insecurity and malnutrition.
Building on the case studies, the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples Mechanism (CSIPM) – represented by Morgan Ody, General Coordinator, La Via Campesina France – called for stronger participation of civil society in determining where finance is sourced, and where it is targeted. Finally, Brent Malahay of the Equity Bank Kenya, on behalf of the Private Sector Mechanism (PSM), reflected on the catalytic role of the CFS in aligning financial actors to overcome fragmentated ecosystems and crowd in more investment.
Moving towards building solutions, CFS Members and participants renewed the call for multilateralism.
Voices from CFS Members and regional participants included His Excellency Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, Special Envoy for Food Systems African Union, and Robson Lopes, General Coordinator of Rural Production Financing Ministry of Rural Development and Family Farming, Brazil, who offered practical examples of successful approaches to financing food security, including adapting lines of credit to specific populations, and unlocking the potential of smallholders as micro-, small- and medium-sized entrepreneurs.
Donor perspectives were shared by Bruce Campbell, Co-chair of the Global Donor Platform for Rural Development; and Lauren Baker, Representative of the Philanthropic Foundations Mechanism (PFM), who highlighted that no stakeholder can act alone; instead, the challenges of fragmentation must be met with coordination.
Rounding out the discussions, a panel of experts from regional and international organizations summarized the lessons of the event and pointed to promising strategies.
From the perspectives of the Rome-Based Agencies, Nuno Santos, Deputy Director of the Investment Center, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and Federica Cerulli Irelli, Chief Partnership Officer, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), reflected on how engaging diverse actors and fostering innovation can help maximize results in contexts of limited fiscal space.
Michael Fakhri, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, and Ibrahima Coulibaly, President of the Pan African Farmers Organization (PAFO), also raised the importance of national policy, stressing that countries can create national food plans to fulfil the duties of national sovereignty to feed the population - while also supporting smallholder farmers as key actors in achieving food security.
Finally, Natasha Hayward, Global Lead, Food and Nutrition Security at the World Bank, called for coordination between food security and nutrition actors, but also with other sectors, to maximize the impact of investments.
The Chairperson of the CFS, H.E. Ambassador Nosipho Nausca-Jean Jezile, closed the event, underscoring the crucial role of collaboration and cooperation to create coherence of policy responses and identify innovative ways to finance food security and nutrition solutions. She reconfirmed the CFS’s commitment to leverage its convening power to facilitate alignment between stakeholders and institutions and to elevate food security and nutrition in the global discussions around financing for development.
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The HLPE-FSN Background Note on strengthening responsible investment and financing for food security and nutrition will present the available data on financial flows to food, review key issues, and identify policy pathways, including sharing recommendations on the contributions of the CFS. It will be published in June, in parallel to the deliberations of the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) in Sevilla, Spain.
The session, organized by the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), was held at the FAO HQ in Rome, Italy and online, with interpretation in English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Portuguese.
1References used for estimating the cost of ending hunger (graph above):
