Dear HLPE Steering Committee and the Project Team,
Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the V0 Draft of the report “Data collection and analysis tools for food security and nutrition”.
The Global Alliance for the Future of Food would like to suggest resources and references that could enhance the content of the report, particularly by contributing to consultation questions #3, #7, and #8. This contribution builds on recent work developed by the Global Alliance with several partners: i) the compendium “The Politics of Knowledge - Understanding the Evidence for Agroecology, Regenerative Approaches, and Indigenous Foodways”; ii) the report “True Value: Revealing the Positive Impacts of Food Systems Transformation”.
Among other issues, the compendium “Politics of Knowledge” revisits fundamental debates on how we understand and document evidence for FSN, and how dominant narratives shape concepts such as data validity, objectivity, and equity in data collection and analysis. It also debates how political power behind dominant narratives can marginalize diverse, non-western, and non-academic types of knowledge - for example those strongly associated with agroecology, regenerative approaches, and Indigenous foodways - forcing narrow views on how to measure success, performance, and resilience in FSN. The report “True Value” digs into a growing area of study in comprehensive metrics for food security, nutrition, and sustainability. Adopting a food systems approach as advocated by numerous HLPE studies, the report demonstrates how using qualitative data and assessment approaches alongside quantitative data and assessment approaches enables us to more clearly describe the interlinkages between actions and impacts, which is important to systems thinking and understanding the connections between systems elements.
Both studies call on us to encourage and embrace diverse forms of evidence to be generated, gathered, meaningfully considered, and communicated, thereby broadening the debate on data in a way that would, in our view, increase the richness of this forthcoming HLPE Report.
Please find our detailed contribution attached to this message.
Thank you for your consideration,
Global Alliance for the Future of Food
Г-н Matheus Alves Zanella