‘Repurposing agricultural support to transform food systems’ FAO, UNDP and UNEP Report – will be discussed at EPSO concepts workshop 26 October 2021

Sep 16, 2021 | EPSO

The report concludes that ‘Agricultural support Is not providing desirable results for sustainability and human health, but repurposing it can be a game changer. It offers governments an opportunity to optimize the sue of scare public resources to transform food systems in ways that make them not only more efficient, but also more supportive of the SDGs.’

The six steps governments may follow include ‘identifying needed reforms’. ‘The time has come for greater collaboration and cooperation across government, research institutions, non-governmental organizations and the private sector to develop evidence on which successful repurposing strategies can be built. The United Nations Food Systems Summit 2021 and other subsequent forums present a momentous opportunity to spearhead action in this direction.’

To this end, the EPSO workshop on further developing the EPSO concepts can make a valuable contribution from academia. It will be held online on 26 October 2021. EPSO members are invited to register with Karin Metzlaff to participate in the workshop.

 

The four main EPSO concepts to further elaborate on are:

  1. Address Food and Nutritional Security, environmental sustainability and human health in parallel as much as possible.
  2. Improve crops towards ‘Diverse crops for diverse diets and human and resilient production’
  3. ‘Combine approaches on crop improvement, crop management and crop processing’, to enable interdisciplinary approaches with co-benefits in Europe and beyond.
  4. Policy makers should define the goals to reach but leave the pathways how to achieve this open to the stakeholders to encourage innovation and combining advantages of different approaches.

An announcement of the workshop will be sent to EPSO members end of September.

Contact us to get involved in the coming weeks : Alan Schulman, Ulrich Schurr, Ernst van den Ende and Karin Metzlaff – EPSO President, Vice-President, Treasurer, Executive Director

 

Links:

 

  • EPSO statement on the Biodiversity Draft SRIA, 29.1.2021 [link]
  • EPSO draft statement on Nutritional security, 11.5.2020 [link]
  • EPSO statement on the EU Farm to Fork strategy, 2.6.2020 [link]
  • EPSO submission to EC mission ideas call, 30.3.2018 ‘1001 crops – diverse crops for diverse diets and human health and sustainable production’ [link]