Building sustainable agriculture and food systems is vital for enhancing food security and nutrition. New approaches which facilitate the effective access and use of existing technologies are needed. The following five steps illustrate regulations, instruments and processes which lead to the creation of enabling environments for development and implementation of agroecology approaches and practices. These five steps are based on a people centred holistic innovative approach which aims for the involvement of various stakeholders inducing food security and nutrition.
1- Reorient food and agricultural policies to encourage diversity, nutrition, sustainability and affordability, rather than only prioritising a small number of staple crops. By re-targeting subsidies, research and extensions programs, investing in research, ensuring that prices of foods reflects their true costs, using dietary guidelines and safeguarding access to (diverse) seeds.
2 - Use markets to support diversity in production and consumption by allowing informal markets to thrive, using procurement, and investing in innovative agri-food SMEs that promote diversity.
3 - Promote and maintain local crop varieties, animal breeds and under-utilised crops through developing markets for them, adjusting extension services, fostering synergies between scientific and local knowledge and investing in Open Source Seed Systems.
4 - Nurture the biocultural heritage and traditional knowledge which underpin much of the world’s remaining agricultural biodiversity. By protecting the rights of women, including local communities and the creation of biocultural heritage.
5 - Increase awareness and catalyse change through innovative multi-stakeholder approaches like food labs - that explicitly bring in the voices and perceptions of farmers and consumers, including women and youth – as well as dissemination of information of diverse diets through the media.
Promoting sustainable agriculture and food systems entails a gradual but definitive shift from industrial agriculture – which relies on monocultures and an unsustainably small number of crops, crop varieties and animal breeds – to diversified sustainable farming systems. In short, this means raising awareness and stimulating demand for diverse and healthy foods as well as the expansion of markets for diverse crops and animals products, both at the national and local scale. Meanwhile, policies, subsidies, research and extension programmes need to be re-aligned to support diverse food production and consumption. Finally, the cultural underpinnings of diverse food systems need to be protected and strengthened. In conclusion, multi-stakeholder approaches can help to facilitate access and use of existing technologies, particularly by using and building upon citizen’s knowledge and practices to re-shape food systems.
Please refer to this publication for a more elaborate explanation of the necessity for the diversification of food systems: https://hivos.org/sites/default/files/web_nourishingdiversity_briefing_f...
Nout van der Vaart