Nutrition and Food Systems

Today, healthy diets are unaffordable for more than 3 billion people, a problem likely to have been exacerbated by COVID-19. Preserving access to safe, diverse nutritious food is an essential part of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly for poor and vulnerable communities, who are hit hardest by the pandemic and its resulting economic shocks.

Investing in nutrition is thus both a moral imperative and a sound economic investment.

These policies should also address the food environment - where consumers engage with a food system to make their food-related decisions. Policies, programmes and investments need to be “nutrition-sensitive”, which means nutrition must be mainstreamed across sectoral policies.

Other examples include investing in transport and cold-chain infrastructure to reduce food loss, food reformulation laws, regulations for retail and food service chains, food labelling policies and legislation to ensure institutional procurement from local smallholder farmers, where possible.

Countries should intensify their efforts and scale up nutrition investments to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target of ending malnutrition in all its forms by 2030.

The FAO Strategic Framework 2022-31 outlines the Organization’s commitment to more efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable agrifood systems, for better production, better nutrition, a better environment, and a better life, leaving no one behind. An agrifood systems transformation can only be achieved by capitalizing on knowledge, experience, and skills from a broad range of public and private actors with different needs and capacities. As this will involve significant governance challenges, FAO supports member countries to balance different actors’ needs, for instance, by supporting the creation of coalitions of actors.