SIDE EVENTS

Realizing Vietnam’s potential as a regional Food Innovation Hub (FIH) requires a well-defined food systems transformation for enhancing productive capacity while expediting agro-industrial readiness for fostering the growth of competitive and responsible Vietnamese enterprises. With high-end global markets moving towards binding sustainability standards for supply chains, transforming Vietnam’s agro-industrial landscape to become socio-environmentally responsible, innovative, and resource efficient can propel Vietnamese enterprises as competitive suppliers with enhanced investment attractiveness for global supply chain actors and consumer markets. Nevertheless, to ensure economy of scale and lower operational costs in this highly competitive market, local enterprises need to develop new type of collaborations while collaborating with each other. Organized by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), the Clustering Industry towards Sustainable Food Systems Transformation in Vietnam invites key public and private players vital for steering the food systems transformation and enhancing the related support services landscape. This side event will facilitate the discussion on how Vietnam’s agro-industrial clusters can be augmented as regional and sectoral focal points for piloting food systems transformation oriented interventions across the country.

This side event, organised by WWF and GAIN, will bring together leading organisations, experts from across the globe, and a handful of ‘champion countries’ to work together on using a holistic approach for accelerating implementation of national pathways and food systems transformation at the national level. The side-event will leverage the expertise and existing work of two global organisations which led action tracks of the UNFSS to highlight how a holistic approach can be used to close transformation, implementation, and ambition gaps to achieve healthy and sustainable food system transformation for all. Participants will walk away with a better understanding of ambitious, holistic, and effective development and implementation of national food systems transformation.

Policies designed in isolation from one another are unlikely to deliver the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and beyond. Ultimately, food systems involve complex challenges, whose scale and nature call for a systemic, multi-level, and multi-stakeholder participatory approach across economic, social, and environmental dimensions. Multi-stakeholder collaboration needs to become an essential pillar of the food systems approach and its role in achieving a transition to sustainable food systems, as it contributes to successfully addressing complex challenges. UNEP, FAO, and UNDP have developed a guide on multi-stakeholder collaboration that aims to support stakeholders working at all levels of the food system in the implementation of the National Pathways for Food Systems Transformation, developed in the context of the UNFSS. The side event will start with a presentation of the 5 building blocks underpinning successful multi-stakeholder collaboration for food systems transformation followed by a panel discussion to share good practices from multi-stakeholder initiatives operating in different geographical locations. The event will conclude with a wrap-up of the panel discussion and recommendations on how to overcome challenges in multi-stakeholder collaboration, with an emphasis on post-UNFSS processes.

Vietnam has achieved a significant improvement of nutrition status of the population over the last decades. However, the current nutrition transition and rising of climate changes require a transform of the food systems to sustain the achievement and further overcome the crises and interaction between climate changes, food security and nutrition security. The National Institute of Nutrition – Ministry of Health, Department of Cooperatives and Rural Development – Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development with support from The Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT, and Embassy of Canada in Vietnam organize the side event entitled “Local-based strategies to sustain food systems targeting household food and nutrition security in Vietnam” to overview of sustainable food systems for healthy diets, food and nutrition security in sustainable food systems on a global scale; introduce local-based strategies and policies to sustain food systems targeting household healthy diets food and nutrition security in Vietnam; share results of nutrition-sensitive agri-food systems to improve diets of children and food and nutrition security in Vietnam; and gain ideas from policymakers, experts and stakeholders on leverage points from nutrition-sensitive agri-food systems to improve healthy diets, food and nutrition security in Vietnam.

In the past 30 years, Vietnam has made great progress in reducing poverty, ensuring food security and promoting economic growth as well as socio-economic development. However, Viet Nam continues to face 3 simultaneous burdens on nutrition, namely the challenge of child malnutrition, micronutrient deficiency is still high in remote and mountainous areas with high share of ethnic minorities, while the rate of overweight and obesity, the incidence of non-communicable diseases associated with nutrition is increasing rapidly in urban areas. At present, food systems do not contribute to healthy diets, fair livelihoods, and sustainable environments in part because of the existence of a range of policy lock-ins and barriers, that prevent or slow the necessary changes. The side event will help systematize basic information on the Food System, an overview of current policies and key actors, which play a role in promoting the transformation of the food system.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF) adopted in December 2022 by the Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity marks a milestone in the walk towards achieving food systems transformation. For the first time, the connection between food and nature is drawn in a clear manner into an international environmental framework. Yet, the Framework gives us little insight into how downscaling and implementing its targets at the national level. This side event will discuss how the implementation of the KM-GBF can be triggered down to the country and subnational levels through existing instruments such as the CBD National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) and the national pathways for food systems transformation resulting from the UNFSS. In particular, the event will explore how the NBSAPs can better integrate a food systems approach to achieve simultaneously biodiversity and food-related outcomes, and how existing UNFSS national pathways can be better linked to the KM-GBF. The session will also present successful cases and best practices from Asia and beyond that can be adapted and replicated to readily implement global targets related to food systems at the national level. This includes highlighting the crucial role of agricultural biodiversity, as an important component of biodiversity and a key resource for sustainable food systems.

By 2050, 68 percent of the world’s population will be living in cities, with 90 percent of the urbanization increase occurring in Africa and Asia. The recent UN Food Systems Summit (UN-FSS) process highlighted the importance of urban food systems for food systems transformation, and in this context it was established a specific Urban Food Systems Coalition.  Despite the global acceptance, urban food systems issues are largely missing from national policy frameworks for food systems transformation including in most of the national pathways. To make concrete progresses on this, FAO, together with partners, is developing a guidance note / framework for action on how to establish multi-level food systems governance mechanisms to strengthen the engagement of local governments in the implementation of food systems national pathways and the achievement of SDGs (especially SDGs 2 and 11). The guidance note will be used as a capacity building tool to assist local and national government. The side-event will debate and collect critical feedback on the development of this instrument. The main outcome of the session will be concrete recommendations on how to develop and improve the relevance and added value of the guidance note.

In a world in which agricultural expansion drives almost 90 percent of global deforestation according to FAO, deforestation free regulations and commitments need to be well understood and translated into positive actions on the ground, where there are complex and challenging contexts with multiple stakeholders involved. Although commitments of public and private sector actors to deforestation-free supply chains are increasing, verifiable impacts on reducing deforestation are yet to be clearly demonstrated. At the same time, 141 countries, containing 90% global forest coverage, are also signatories to the Glasgow Declaration on Forest and Land Use committed to “halt and reverse” forest loss and land degradation by 2030 while at the same time “delivering sustainable development and promoting an inclusive rural transformation.” As such, there needs to be greater efforts to connect the numerous international commitments with initiatives underway in the countries.  This side-event at the 4th Global Conference of the SFS Programme will have one-hour panel discussion followed by a robust 30 min Question and Answer session. The panel bringing together the experience and expertise of various institutions in the fields of government, private sector, smallholder business, finance and international development, will answer questions and provide insights on a range of topics including land and forest governance, public-private collaborations, balance trade-offs and synergies between different stakeholder groups, regulation compliance.

Transformation of food systems is critical to put the world back on track to meet the SDGs by 2030. But hidden costs — and undervaluation of beneficial practices — are hampering our ability to identify the solutions needed to meet the SDGs and other critical global goals. This session will feature recent case studies to demonstrate the potential for True Cost Accounting (TCA) to guide integrated policy actions to transform food systems. Participants will build practical understanding of how to use TCA as a tangible and actionable approach to enable progress toward the SDGs and guide implementation of countries’ UNFSS National Food Systems Pathways commitments. By holistically assessing the full array of impacts, dependencies, and trade-offs from food system activities, TCA can create a roadmap for leaders toward decisions with maximum value for people and the planet.

This event explores agroecological (AE) innovations and pathways as key approach for FS transformation which positively impacts a range of SDGs. The focus is on SEA innovative experiences to help improve the recommendations and guides for actions and policies developed by the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) and FAO, and to accelerate the uptake of AE approach to strengthen the sustainability of FS.
The event builds on a broad-based R4D and UN agencies led consortium that draws from the Agroecology and Safe Food Systems Transition (ASSET) project partnership and the Transformative Partnership Platform (TPP) on Agroecology, hosted by CIFOR-ICRAF and co-convened with CIRAD, INRAE & Agreenium. It features speakers from Government, UN agencies, AE Coalition, research agencies, farmer organizations and civil societies, who play key roles in promoting AE transition at all levels. The event showcases a diverse range of AE initiatives from SEA countries and discusses how different combinations of the 13 actionable AE principles in the HLPE report (2019) set the framework guiding sustainable agriculture and food systems.