CFS Meeting on Sustainable Forestry for Food Security and Nutrition

17 September 2019, 09:30 - 12.30
FAO, Red Room
Rome, Italy

The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) at its 44th Session in 2017, endorsed a set of policy recommendations on Sustainable Forestry for Food Security and Nutrition which were elaborated around the main findings of a detailed report of the CFS High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE).

These policy recommendations highlight the key role of forests and trees in ensuring food security and nutrition by contributing to dietary quality and diversity, serving as a safety net in periods of food scarcity, generating income for local people, and providing essential ecosystem services for agriculture.

They also note that land degradation and global deforestation, caused mainly by agriculture, driven by increased demand, - adversely impact the environment and ecosystems that ground the livelihoods of indigenous peoples, local communities, and smallholders and agriculture as a whole.

CFS stakeholders thus stressed that sustainable agriculture and food security and nutrition cannot be achieved at the expense of forests, and that actions should be taken to promote better coordination of land use policies and strengthen sustainable management of forests.

Specific attention was paid to the need to strengthen policy coherence across sectors by integrating resilience-enhancing dimensions of forests into agricultural and food security and nutrition programmes and policies.

The CFS Bureau is convening an open meeting to address issues that were not sufficiently discussed during the policy convergence process, including the relation between commercial plantations and food security and nutrition.