The Leadership Dialogue on Food Systems for Prosperity, held on 25 July duing the UNFSS+2 Stocktaking Moment, focused on identifying concrete approaches that can be incorporated into policies and national pathways to drive economic prosperity in synergy with advancing income and gender equality, environment, and nutrition.  

The panelist stressed the importance of collaboration and dialogue between all actors of agrifood systems to address the various gaps in the system, from gender pay and power gap, to access to finance, services and training, to the true cost of food and the social and environmental impacts of food production. Cooperation has proven to work multiple times before and having a common goal that is shared by everyone is one way to create a dialogue and consolidate different stakeholder interests.  

Women empowerment is crucial if we want to ensure agrifood system transformation. This entails investing in women and ensuring that all sub-sectors work for women. Beyond representation and empowerment of women who are directly engaged in food production, there is a need for higher representation of women in leadership positions in food and agriculture organizations worldwide, especially women from lower income countries.Besides changing the culture, a concrete example of making the agrifood systems work better for women is addressing the gap in access to technology.  

Youth empowerment and inclusion in decision-making is also needed to ensure that young people stay in agrifood systems and secure their incomes from agrifood activities. Increasing mechanization of agriculture, innovation and technology, but also agroecological approaches are some of the concrete examples that may bring youth back to the agrifood sector.  

We need to invest in consumer behavioural change and ensure that market incentives in production aligns with the consumption segment. Overall, ensuring policy coherence throughout the agrifood system and striking a balance between different trade-offs will be crucial moving forward.  

The panel concluded on the need for a new way of managing our commons, by having a dialogue, collaborating and working together,with different interests but towards a shared and common goal.  

Further information about the event and the recording of the session are available on the UNFSS+2 official website at this link .