Slow Food recommends that the CFS give a high priority to the following issues in the biennium 2016-2017:
1.b. The “Sustainability of the food system” should be a major work stream, which should include a reflection on the following related issues:
- Environmental and social cost associated with the production and consumption of the food products. It is important to study the real costs of food products in order to understand which impacts are not properly valued and internalized in their costs. This knowledge should be integrated into policies ensuring that the externalities are internalized. Mechanism: Elaboration of an HLPE report
- Animal welfare. Slow Food has been actively working to promote a holistic approach to food and agriculture for many years and good animal welfare practices are a fundamental part of this. They are important not only because they respect animals as sentient beings, but also because they benefit farmers, consumers and the environment. FAO data indicates that around 1 billion people depend on animals as a source of income, food, cultural identity and social status. It is estimated that 60% of families that live in rural areas keep animals. Animal welfare is of crucial importance to these communities in that a secure supply of food depends on the health and productivity of animals, and these in turn depend on the care and nutrition that animals receive. Good living conditions for animals means better animal health, less stress and subsequently less disease and use of drugs. While structural investments for the improvement of production facilities in the short term can be very costly for producers, the benefits in productivity and in improved product quality can increase income. Mechanism: Elaboration of an HLPE report
- International, national and local tools available to bring policies into coherence with the right to food. Mechanism: Elaboration of an HLPE report, including the design of food policies, case studies and the identification of new ways of working in partnership and harmonized action at global, regional, national and local levels
- The role of biodiversity for food security and nutrition. Mechanism: improve understanding of the multi-dimensional causes of biodiversity loss, the sharing of more effective analytical tools to assist in identifying root causes and the appropriate combination of political and technical responses to address them.
- The economic, environmental and socio-cultural sustainability of small-scale farming and its contribution to global food security. In developed and developing countries all over the world, indigenous farmers and communities hold traditional knowledge, expertise, skills and practices related to environmental management and food security as well as to agricultural production and diversity. Traditional farming, fishing, pastoralism/herding, foraging and forestry are based on long established knowledge systems and practices that help to ensure food and agricultural diversity, valuable landscape and seascape features, livelihoods and food security. For millennia, these have provided rural communities with the necessary resilience to counter challenges and ensure survival. However, traditional livelihoods and indigenous plant varieties, landraces and animal breeds are now increasingly endangered by factors such as large-scale commercialization of agriculture, population dynamics, politico-economic discrimination, land-use/cover changes and the impacts of climate change. Mechanism: Elaboration of an HLPE report focusing on tools and strategies to support small-scale farmers beyond 2014 IYFF, including a reflection on “How to reshape the food systems in order to be more inclusive of small scale food producers who have generally been disadvantaged in the past, both as a result of inequitable food chains and because agricultural technologies and legislations have not taken into account their specific needs?”
- “Food losses and waste in the context of sustainable food systems”. Forecasts all seem to agree that in 2050 there will 9 billion people sharing the planet. Considering that today (with a world population of 7 billion) there are already one billion people who do not eat adequately, the outlook is not good. The most disparate voices are increasingly stressing the fact that, in order to feed everyone, it will be necessary to increase productivity by 70%, with cultivated arable land decreasing in the meantime. This explains the rush to genetically manipulate seeds to create hyper-productive plant species. This explains the idea of giving animals hormones to make them grow in half the normal time and the current abuse of antibiotics in intensive farming to prevent and cure diseases in an environment in which they spread more easily and more rapidly. This explains the inevitable destruction of forests to obtain more arable land (which nonetheless loses its fertility in the space of a few seasons). However, in all these arguments, there is an essential piece of information that is being ignored, namely that today the Earth already produces enough food for 12 billion people, but 40% of all food produced is wasted, never getting close to the table. As a recent FAO study highlights: “In medium- and high-income countries food is to a significant extent wasted at the consumption stage and early in the food supply chains. In low-income countries food is lost mostly during the early and middle stages of the food supply chain; much less food is wasted at the consumer level. The causes of food losses and waste in low-income countries are mainly connected to financial, managerial and technical limitations in harvesting techniques, storage and cooling facilities in difficult climatic conditions, infrastructure, packaging and marketing systems. Given that many smallholder farmers in developing countries live on the margins of food insecurity, a reduction in food losses could have an immediate and significant impact on their livelihoods.” Mechanism: offer policy guidance and a common understanding for all governments and other stakeholders to ensure that ensure that food losses and waste are properly tackled starting from the assumption that they are not accident, but they are organic to the current food system and that to fight them it is necessary to change the food system giving value back to food.
- “The role of sustainable fisheries and aquaculture for food security and nutrition”. Mechanism: give follow up to the report considering that cultural and biological diversity is such that we cannot reasonably expect top down, generalized measures to solve our problems. Again, solutions need to focus on scale matching scale, and considering the overall costs of fine-scale assessment, policy design, implementation and enforcement, adapted to every ecosystem and culture, bottom up solutions and management must absolutely be promoted, by giving local institutions as much space and legitimacy as possible. We need to create or strengthen the conditions that allow this instead of continuously degrading them. This starts with participative, open dialogue and transparency at all levels, from policy lobbying, to bilateral agreements to markets and price fixation mechanisms.
- Voluntary guidelines for securing small-scale fisheries. Mechanism: promote diffusion of the voluntary guidelines among FAO’s Regional fishery bodies and develop tools to support governments and stakeholders in the implementation.
1.b. As suggested in the MYPOW adopted in 2013, we support the launch of a CFS major workstream to develop a framework for implementing the post-2015 agenda on issues related to sustainable agriculture, food security and nutrition (to be decided at CFS Plenary in 2015) i.e. once the post-2015 agenda will be adopted by the UN General Assembly.
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