Introducing Call to Action at Food Systems Summit, Deputy Secretary-General Urges Greater Investment, Leadership to End Widespread Hunger, Poverty

Following are UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s closing remarks and introduction of the Secretary-General’s Call to Action:  Food Systems Summit, today:

We have come to the end of the Food Systems Summit stock take. Over the last three days, you’ve gathered around an essential task — highlighting efforts to make food systems work for people and planet and to steer global action towards Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

I would like to sincerely thank the Government of Italy for hosting, facilitating and supporting this important meeting.  I also commend each and every one of the leaders and ministers — overwhelmingly from the Global South — who made the effort to come together this week.  Thank you to the Member States for keeping us on our feet.  Thank you also to the United Nations family — including our three Rome-based agencies — for making this happen and preparing the ground so effectively. And thanks to all of you in attendance for being part of this essential work, especially our youth, indigenous people and women for being part of this essential work.

We meet today just over one month out from a hugely important SDG Summit.  When world leaders endorsed the SDGs, in 2015, it was a moment of genuine hope and possibility.  Few would have predicted we would reach the halfway point so far off track.  But there is no escaping this reality.  We are failing in our quest to end poverty and hunger; in our fight against climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss; and in our pursuit of gender equality, shared prosperity and peace for all.

Yet, I am heartened by what I have seen over the last three days, especially by women and youth.  In two years, the vision that the Secretary-General put forward in the 2021 Food Systems Summit has rooted, creating momentum for a movement.  At this meeting, countries shared vivid accounts of your food systems journeys through more than 100 voluntary reports. And stakeholders developed and shared a shadow report.

You have spoken about your achievements.  You have spoken about threats, frustrations and difficulties ahead.  Yet to borrow an analogy that is well known here in the home not only of food, but also of football, no game is ever won in the first half.

Together, we are building an engine of true transformation to drive us forward.  The energy, commitment and determination I have witnessed these last days can bring us closer to achieving the other development transitions that will make or break the SDGs — from education, and social protection, to jobs, clean energy, nature and digitalization. 

We might not be winning the game at half time, but the final outcome is still within our control, and this can be a winning team. But there is no time to lose and as we have discussed in this gathering, we need acceleration.  We need breakthroughs on SDG financing and the means of implementation.

The last three years have dramatically changed the fiscal and debt profiles of many developing countries.  Addressing the high cost of debt and the mounting risk of debt distress is of utmost importance as demonstrated in the recent report launched by the Secretary-General, “A world of debt.  A growing burden to global prosperity”.  Countries need breathing space and greater international support and investment — and they need it now.

Developing countries, especially those with high debt burdens, require increased liquidity during times of crisis and we have the responsibility of making the global safety net work for all people.  The message is clear.  Without access to financing and debt relief, developing countries will not be able to invest in food systems that take us beyond just feeding people.  We need your continued leadership and we need ambition.

The challenges faced by our food systems are not easily overcome.  Rural poverty is persistent and widespread.  258 million people are facing acute insecurity.  45 million children are suffering wasting.  And 670 million are people facing hunger in 2030, the same proportion as in 2015.

Progress on food systems is also blocked by the absence of opportunities for young people, gender inequalities, marginalization, and a sector that contributes more than one third of greenhouse gas emissions and as much as 80 per cent of biodiversity loss and uses up to 70 per cent of freshwater.

And as the Secretary-General said on Monday, the situation has become more dire with the termination of the Black Sea Grain Initiative. Under the Global Crises Response Group, the United Nations continues to look at alternatives to respond to the evolving finance, energy and food crises, including by calling on the global community to support efforts towards the return to the full implementation of the Black Sea Grain Initiative.  We need the full participation and commitment of Member States to turn the tide and get back on track.

The conversation about finance has not been absent — but real commitments to invest have.  We need the capitalization of the multilateral development banks.  We need the replenishment of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).  All this can be done through the rechannelling of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) — a call the United Nations recently reiterated in Paris.

Allow me to briefly recall that none of these commitments are outside the outcomes that all Member States already negotiated through the 2030 Agenda.  This stock take is meant to elevate and rescue these commitments.  We have a community of stakeholders that is working together in common purpose.  But there are still gaps that we must address.

For example, we need to engage more strategically with the private sector.  The private sector is among the coalitions coming out of the Food Systems Summit, but we must do more to get the investments, the science and the innovation needed.  We cannot leave this room without recognizing as a collective the centrality of the private sector in the food and agriculture sector.

Together with Member States and the private sector, we need to support, energize and empower local partners, civil society and Indigenous communities at the forefront of this battle.  We need the food systems ecosystem, the private sector and technology companies all shifting their focus towards people, not profit, to ensure better outcomes for people and planet.  This must be among our top priorities for the Food Systems Summit +4.

We leave this stock taking with a clear path forward, and a renewed sense of urgency and conviction.  This urgency and conviction are well-reflected in the Secretary-General’s Call to Action for Accelerated Food Systems Transformation, which I have the honour of introducing today.

The Call to Action recognizes the compounding crises over the past three years that have had a dramatic effect on already fragile food systems.  It highlights shocking data that shows how far we are in our journey.  The unequal access to finance, the international financial architecture that is not fit-for-purpose, the persistence of war and conflict, and ever-worsening climate change.  All of this makes food system transformation even tougher.

But instead of weakening our resolve, these challenges sharpen our collective realization that sustainable food systems are one of the fundamental conditions for human dignity, a prosperous future and a healthy planet.  They have strengthened our commitment to transform food systems to help deliver on the promise of the 2030 Agenda.  In short — we are turning ambition into action.

There is much more to be done.  This stock take has allowed us to amplify these successes and agree on actionable next steps to make food systems work for people and planet alike. 

The Secretary-General’s Call to Action is a call to all actors to step up and commit to action and implementation around six concrete objectives:  One — we must embed food systems strategies across all national policies for sustainable development.  Two — we must establish food systems governance that brings together all stakeholders across society.  Three — we must invest in research, data, innovation and technology capacities.

Four — we must promote engagement and accountability of businesses to shape the sustainability of food systems, recognizing their centrality in the food and agriculture ecosystem.  Five — at every step of implementation, we must include the full participation of women, farmers, young people and Indigenous Peoples at the local level.  Six — we must ensure long-term, concessional finance, investments, budget support and debt-restructuring.

This must include making the SDG Stimulus a reality and designing solutions to debt, including by reforming the international financial architecture and strengthening the role of multilateral development banks.  It must include working with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and international financial institutions to deliver immediate investments in emergency food support, especially in African countries where hunger is twice the global average.

The United Nations Global Crisis Response Group recommendation for a Food Import Facility and the Least Developed Countries 5 Food Stockholding Mechanism should be fully operationalized.  Trade barriers, harmful subsidies and export restrictions must be avoided, and hoarding and speculative behaviour addressed.  We must ensure the openness, integrity, market transparency and resilience of supply chains.

This is a tall order of business.  But this Stocktaking Moment has confirmed what we learned at the first Food Systems Summit in 2021 — that we can increase ambition and accelerate action.

At every step, the United Nations System, led by the coordinated action of the Rome-based agencies Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Food Programme (WFP) and IFAD, and the United Nations Food Systems Coordination Hub, will continue to provide leadership to make food systems transformation a reality for the 155 countries and stakeholders that have embarked on this process already, and those that we encourage to join in the future.

This is our collective responsibility and our common purpose.  We are proud to take this journey with all of you.  Let us take the spirit of this convening into the broader push to rescue the SDGs and into the concrete, day-to- day efforts to make food systems work for people and planet.

A number of global gatherings are happening this year: the SDG Summit, the High level Dialogue on Financing for Development and three health meetings, World Food Forum, the Group of Twenty (G20) Leaders Summit in New Delhi, the IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings in Marrakesh and Twenty-eighth Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 28) in Dubai — we have a chance to turn the tide together.  The time for food systems transformation is now and depends on each of us working collectively and in solidarity.

Perhaps I can end with one last real live expression of how desperate people are. Last week, Cindy McCain and I visited Chad.  We did so to see the humanitarian crisis on the border with Sudan.  And there were two sides to that coin.  We visited the crisis on the border - we saw atrocities and horrendous hardship for women and children.  But we also saw the other side, visiting many of the islands in the Lake Chad, where development was happening at a slow pace. But, it was happening.

So the call here again to the international community is that we must do something about what we need to do to help 330,000 people running into Chad to save their lives and passing several checkpoints with atrocities that before them into a country that has nothing, but it's so generous to give. We must support that side of our human family equally.

At the same time, if we want to get to the root cause of many of these conflicts, development needs to be treated as an emergency.  Because what we saw is too little too late.  And we saw both sides of that coin.

My last call, of course, is for leaders who inflict such pain on their populations.  It is today unacceptable that we have these conflicts, and they are amongst men.  We need to find peace and not to win wars, because they're never won.  It's always on the back of women and children.  And with that, let me just say, as Nelson Mandela once said:  “It always seems impossible, until it's done.”

Thank you all for being part of this essential cause.