Disaster has no boundaries and it affects everyone. In her opinion paper, Wirya Khim discusses the impact of COVID-19 on the agriculture and food systems through a DRR lens and offers some key lessons learned.

With trade recognized as a means of implementation under Agenda 2030, policy-makers will need to ensure that trade, and policies affecting trade and markets, are taken into consideration as part of their efforts to achieve SDG 2. The five targets that set out the level and ambition of SDG 2 (ending hunger; ending all forms of malnutrition; doubling the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers; ensuring sustainable food production systems; and maintaining genetic diversity), as well as trade itself, often constitute distinct policy priorities for governments. Trade and related policy measures that may be designed to achieve one target can potentially have unintended negative consequences that undermine the achievement of other targets, both within the country where the measure is applied and in the trading partner countries. It is therefore important that policy-makers identify and recognize areas in which difficult tradeoffs may be needed between competing policy objectives, and identify possible ways in which these can be addressed. Furthermore, while the different targets set out under SDG 2 are mutually interdependent and inter-related, it is important to address the trade policy dimension of each component individually as part of a broader plan of action.

Sustainable growth in Agriculture is not only a national priority in all countries but a global endeavor as well, particularly to achieve the SDG-2. There are, however, some perceptions that rules of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) agreements may hinder policy space in this regard. This information note attempts to outline the relevant rules on domestic support (subsidies) in the WTO Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) and highlights the available policy space with Member Countries to support the sustainable agriculture. It shows that the provisions under Development Box and Green Box provide, essentially, an unlimited allowance for subsidizing agriculture subject to criteria defined therein.

In his opinion paper, Julio Pinto (Animal Health Officer, FAOLOG) looks at the lessons learnt from COVID-19 and how we can progress with the implementation of One Health for a safer and healthier global ecosystem.

Five years after the world committed to end hunger, food insecurity and all forms of malnutrition, we are still off track to achieve this objective by 2030. There are many threats to progress. The 2017 and 2018 editions of this report showed that conflict and climate variability and extremes undermine efforts to end hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition. In 2019, the report showed that economic slowdowns and downturns also undercut these efforts. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as unprecedented desert locust outbreaks in Eastern Africa, are obscuring global economic prospects in ways no one could have anticipated, and the situation may only get worse if we do not act urgently and take unprecedented action.