Consolidating Family Farmers Voices on Food Systems Summit

Consolidating Family Farmers Voices on Food Systems Summit
AFA Independent Dialogue Series for the Food Systems Summit
1 July 2021 | 14:00 GMT/UTC+8 (Philippine Time) | Zoom
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Background

The United Nation (UN) recognized that transforming food systems is central in efforts to achieve all the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 thus it has called on all world leaders to take part in the Food Systems Summit in 2021  to help establish the future direction for food systems in the world and accelerate collective action. The Summit will be held in New York in September 2021 and will be preceded by a Pre-Summit in Rome in July 2021. It has been dubbed as a People’s Summit as well as a Solutions Summit, enjoining all governments and their citizens  be engaged and involved in identifying game-changing solutions and in committing to act on these solutions.

A pre-Summit will take place on July 26-28. The three-day event will “bring together youth, smallholder farmers, indigenous peoples, researchers, private sector, policy leaders and ministers of agriculture, environment, health, and finance among others to deliver the latest evidence-based and scientific approach from around the world, launch a set of new commitments through coalitions of action, and mobilize new financing and partnerships.”

The pre-Summit will be informed from inputs collected by The FSS Secretariat from a global audience (from youth activists to indigenous leaders, from smallholder farmers to scientists and CEOs).  In this regard, the UN Special Envoy for the Food Systems Summit Dr. Agnes Kalibata has invited all sectors of society to share their perspectives and solutions through various mechanisms. One of these mechanisms is the Independent Dialogues, which are conducted by non-state actors who would like to contribute to the discussions on Solutions for sustainable food systems.  The outcomes of these Independent Dialogues will feed into the pre-Summit.

AFA’s initiative in Food System Summit (FSS)  

This is an independent dialogue convened by the Asian Farmers Association for Sustainable Rural Development (AFA), an alliance of national farmers organizations, currently with 22 member organizations in 16 countries, comprising around 13M small scale women and men family farmers engaged in crops, livestock, fisheries, forestry, herding, and pastoralism. In the months of May and June, AFA has facilitated the conduct of national independent dialogues in 10 countries, convened by its member and partner national farmers’ organizations. It has co-organized, along with partner regional /international farmers organizations INOFO, PIFON, and WFO a week-long independent dialogue focusing on the issues on climate change adaptation, agroecology and organic agriculture, sustainable fishing, and farmers’ market power.

This independent dialogue will allow internal reflection on various independent dialogues where AFA has actively engaged, identify its priority game-changing solutions viz its current Strategic Plan, as well as identify possible partnerships with other stakeholders to implement priority game-changing solutions.

Objectives

In this independent dialogue, AFA hopes to:

Present to multi-stakeholder partners the consolidated views, perspectives, solutions, recommendations, and commitments gathered from our members and partners at national and regional levels;

Identify common solutions and form of partnerships, among various regional and international farmers’ organizations and development partners;

Identify other mechanisms and processes at various levels that can be maximized to integrate key recommendations and actions from the independent dialogues; and

Gain consensus on common post-ID activities and campaigns that can be jointly undertaken.

Participants

Participants to the session are primarily AFA members and partners -family farmers’ organizations, agriculture cooperatives, Civil Society Organizations, private sector, government representatives, multilateral donors.

Program

Main Facilitator: Bernie Galang, AFA M&E Officer