Latin America And The Caribbean At The Food Systems Summit

On 23 September 2021, the Food Systems Summit convened by the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, was held. Latin America and the Caribbean played an essential role in this event. The official proposals and recommendations presented at the Summit are part of the official reports of the national dialogues and the speeches of their official representatives. In this publication, we reproduce the transcripts of these 23 speeches. This publication is an invitation to those who want to learn about Latin America and the Caribbean proposals at the Summit.

The book has been prepared by authors from different international organizations – including FAO, IFPRI, UNCTAD and ECLAC, as well as legislators and academics from prestigious Latin American universities – seeking to foster reflections for the Global Food Systems Summit, to be held in September 2021. It contextualizes the region’s food systems within a post COVID-19 pandemic scenario and raises new challenges (and opportunities) for policy makers, decision makers, the private sector, and the general public. Likewise, it offers important reflections on sustainability, from production to consumption, with the call to promote better governance of the global and regional food system. In order to face what some authors have deemed “the Syndemic of the century”, the participation of companies, research centres, academia, NGOs, government agencies and international organizations will be necessary.

Latin America and the Caribbean deviates from its path toward the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goal 2: Zero Hunger. The number of undernourished people increased for the third consecutive year reaching 39.3 million, 6.1% of the population. The social and economic inequalities that characterize the region aggravate the problem of malnutrition. Vulnerable groups, such as the population living in poverty, children, women, indigenous peoples and rural inhabitants, tend to experience more severe problems of hunger and malnutrition. Inequality of malnutrition is also seen in gender. The problems of malnutrition in the region are the result of the profound changes that have affected its food systems, which determine the quantity, quality and diversity of food available for consumption, a transformation that has been driven by growing urbanization, changes in diets and new ways of producing and processing food. The solution to the problems of hunger and malnutrition in the region requires changes to its food systems.

This publication sets out a detailed systems analysis approach to the small and medium agro-food industries sector in Latin America and the Caribbean region, in order to promote food safety and quality as well as enterprise productivity and competitiveness. The issues are discussed from food engineering and technology perspectives, in light of the complex issues faced by small food industries in the current trading system.

Regional Overview present the regional food security and nutrition situation, including trends of undernourishment, food insecurity and all forms of malnutrition, together with other indicators that could help the understanding of the causes of hunger and malnutrition. This edition offers a regional overview of the socioeconomic state of the region; national and regional data and trends regarding the costs and affordability of healthy diets; the possible drivers behind the high cost of healthy diets and their unaffordability; and introduces policies and investments around the region that aim to reduce the cost of nutritious foods and improve the affordability of healthy diets.

Agri-food production remains vital to the economies in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Food systems are rapidly changing and are driven by income growth, (urban) population growth, shifts in dietary preferences, and agricultural productivity growth. Food systems are also under threat from disrupters like climate change and distorting policies (including trade wars). This paper makes two quantitative, forward-looking assessments for the future of food and agriculture in the LAC region. The first focuses on the long-term prospects - given projected pathways for the main drivers and under the threat of climate change. The second focuses on current vulnerability of LACs agri-food system to short-term disrupters with special reference to impacts of global trade wars and the prospects for reducing that vulnerability. The implications are not uniform across the countries in the region, but vary greatly depending on economic and demographic size, contribution of the agricultural sector to national GDP, natural resource endowments, ecological and climatic characteristics, level of sophistication of rural and agrarian institutions, available technology, farm-size distribution and tenure systems. Policy interventions to address the challenges will need to consider those differences in initial conditions. The foresight assessments are built on IFPRI’s core global model frameworks, IMPACT and MIRAGRODEP. They allow to capture the complexity of agri-food system development and the scenario analysis helps quantify the relative importance of the drivers and disruptors of food system change, which in turn should be of essential to policymakers in setting priorities for steering towards sustainable and stable food systems capable of meeting twenty-first century challenges.

Diverse foods derived from livestock production systems, including grazing and pastoralist systems, and from the hunting of wild animals, provide high-quality proteins, important fatty acids and various vitamins and minerals – contributing to healthy diets for improved nutrition and health. Livestock species are adapted to a wide range of environments, including areas that are unsuitable for crop production. Globally, more than a billion people depend on livestock value chains for their livelihoods. Small-scale livestock farmers and pastoralists make up a large proportion of livestock producers. Well integrated livestock production increases the resilience of small-scale farming systems. Livestock also provide other important ecosystem services in landscape management, provide energy and help to improve soil fertility. Rangeland or grassland ecosystems occupy some 40 percent of the world’s terrestrial area. Livestock keepers raise grazing animals to transform grassland vegetation into food. Challenges related to high resource utilization and pollution, food–feed competition, greenhouse-gas emissions, antimicrobial resistance and animal welfare as well as zoonotic and food-borne diseases, accessibility and affordability need to be solved if agrifood systems are to become more sustainable. FAO’s Committee on Agriculture requested a comprehensive, science- and evidence-based global assessment of the contribution of livestock to food security, sustainable food systems, nutrition and healthy diets, considering environmental, economic and social sustainability. The assessment consists of four component documents. This first component document provides a holistic analysis of the contribution of terrestrial animal source food to healthy diets for improved nutrition and health outcomes over the course of people’s lives.