Hello everyone. I'd like to extend a very warm welcome to all participants and audience members for this next event in World Forestry Week. We're going to be talking here about food systems, transformation, land use and deforestation. I'd like to introduce myself briefly. My name is Astrid Agostini. I'm the coordinator of FAO's work on REDD+. on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and non-national forest monitoring. And I'm also a member of the management group of the UN REDD program, which is a flagship partnership of FAO, UNDP and UNEP to support countries to hold deforestation. It's my very great pleasure to moderate today's event on food systems, transformation, land use and deforestation. And before I introduce the topic and the excellent panel of speakers, I wanted to start off with just a few logistical remarks. You may have already seen this. Interpretation is available in English, French and Spanish and can be selected in the bottom bar. Please note also that the session will be recorded and it will be published on the FAO webpage. You can use the hashtag at cofo25 to connect with us on Twitter and tweet at FAO forestry also to see the key highlights from both World Forestry Week and from the cofo sessions. Today in today's session, because we have a very tight program and very good speakers that we want to who's inside we want to share with you, we will not have a chance unfortunately to take an audience Q&A. But audience members that are connected on Zoom can post in the chat box. And we welcome comments and links that are pertinent to the topic that we're discussing today. This is also very relevant because while today's event is an event in its own right, the timing is very fortuitous because next week we will have FAO's committee on forestry in its 25th meetings and deforestation and food systems are very high on the agenda. There'll be a high level dialogue on turning the tide on deforestation on Tuesday and on Wednesday the committee will deliberate specifically on food systems and deforestation and come up with recommendations for action both by member countries and of course also for the FAO secretariat. So the insights from today's session should directly feed also into this momentum for decisions and for action and also in the broader sense of course going into next year's major events COP26, the World Forestry Congress and the UN Food Systems Summit that are all happening in 2021 and will provide us an opportunity to really galvanize global and country action towards transformational change that ensures a healthy planet. So now focusing specifically on the session and introducing the topic, why are we talking about food systems, transformation, land use and deforestation? Well deforestation continues at alarming rates, we've already heard this today. Agriculture is the main driver of deforestation and this holds true in all regions but there are difference of course between commercial agricultural pressure and those posed by subsistence agriculture but it's not just the way we produce food but also what we eat and how what we produce gets from where it's produced to from farmers to the consumers that has profound implications on pressures on forests. The discussions we're having on food systems transformation and discussions on integrated production on ensuring sustainable landscapes they're very prominent at the moment there's a lot of attention but we also see that some of these discussions are disjointed and we're all very quick to call for a food systems approach to have a systematic approach and yet in practice we also end up very quickly focusing on one part of the puzzle or some parts of the puzzle, how to produce sustainably, how to make a living from agriculture, how to protect resources or how to adopt healthy diets, how to educate consumers, how do we organize markets. What we want to try to attempt in today's event is to explore how the critical aspect of land use and deforestation should be considered and addressed across the breadth of interventions that will allow us to deliver a sustainable food system and with me to explore and discuss these matters and share insights from some key analytical work and policy work as well as country experience I have a distinguished panel of experts who I'd like to introduce to you briefly. So we have Tim Searchinger who's a research scholar at Princeton University and the lead author of the World Resources Report creating a sustainable food future which is produced by the World Resources Institute. We have Per Faro who's the co-director International Climate and Forest Initiative in the Ministry of Climate and Environment in Norway. He's the co-lead author of Growing Better 10 Critical Transitions to Transform Food and Land Use which was produced by the Food and Land Use Coalition and Tim and Per will respectively share insights from these key reports. We will then have a country perspective to see how this really fans out at country level and we're joined by Agus Justianto who's the director general of the Agency for Research Development Innovation in the Ministry of Environment and Forestry of Indonesia and having heard from these three speakers we will have three experts to provide some reflections on these findings and country insights and to offer their proposals and further considerations for how to upscale action and how to ensure sustainability. We have Leslie Lipper visiting fellow from Cornell University, Saswati Bora head of food systems innovation at the World Economic Forum and Jamie Morrison who's the director of food systems and food safety at FAO. You can find more information about all the speakers on our events website and I also wanted to note that two of the six are joining us at 6 a.m. in the morning and one is joining from holiday so I think this really shows the important momentum and how much dedication there is to try and capture this momentum for change and so it was a big thank you for this participation up front and without further ado I'd like to hand over to the first presenter so Tim you have the floor. Can everyone hear me? Yes I can hear you okay great and let me start my slideshow so thanks everyone actually of course starting at 6 a.m. is appropriate if you're on a farming panel and this is the report we produced it took about eight years about 560 pages for the World Bank UN and WRI and you can see the citation the where you can find it here there's a technical summary so everything I'm about to say is uncovered obviously in much more detail in that report and let me just start by saying okay here's the global land use challenge agriculture as you know already occupies half of the world's vegetated land and we are going to need between our study focused on the 2010 to 2050 period we're going to need more than 50 percent more crops the projection is also for 70 percent more livestock products and more than 80 percent more ruminant livestock products in particular ruminant meat or beef and lamb which is the most land intensive food and if we don't close that gap we don't produce that much more food per year by 2050 we're going to not be able to feed everyone so obviously that's critical the problem is of course that producing that much more food among other things will take more land so we projected under kind of historical yield gains that even if we did that at historical yield gains we would clear about another 600 million hectares of land and about two-thirds of that for pasture I want to keep focusing on that people tend not to pay enough attention to pasture a third of the world's pasture was historically forested and that means we're going to clear more forest for pasture if we just followed yield gains over the previous 20 years in fact we clear more land and then this is what I really want to focus your attention on if we didn't improve our our livestock outputs our livestock efficiencies and our crop yields we would have to clear more than three billion hectares of land then there basically wouldn't be a forest left on the planet so even though we think if we just kind of maintain historical yields which is a challenge we'll only clear 600 million hectares about twice the size of India the reality is we really have to dramatically dramatically increase yields to avoid clearing a lot more land and so just to illustrate that our baseline is this problem but already implicit in our baseline our yield gains that avoid more than two and a half billion hectares of land clearing and if we don't do this by the way what we're going to happen is agriculture and land use change which today contribute about a quarter about 12 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions that will increase to 15 if we really want to solve climate change we need that to go down to four gigatons if not agriculture alone will contribute 70 percent of the allowable emissions from all human sources so in other words we need to produce more than 50 percent more food with one third of the emissions by 2050 so here's the first lesson that if all we do is protect forests but we don't increase crop yields we don't increase productivity and livestock yields it won't work we're going to clear land we're going to clear land because we have to the second lesson is that every solution requires among other things ways to hold down demand and so this is our elaborate 22 menu item set of solutions to solving climate change the first category after those yield gains is reducing demand above all that means holding down beef consumption by the rich so 20 of the world's wealthy 20 percent of the world eat significant amounts of beef and those people have to eat about 50 less beef but we also have to avoid expanding bioenergy food reduce food loss and waste that's critical and meanwhile we're doing the opposite so this is the world has started just cutting down trees to burn them in power plants to give you some idea if the world wants to produce 2 percent more energy from wood that would require doubling the harvest of the commercial harvest of wood which obviously is not compatible with protecting forests and one problem with all bioenergy is this incredibly inefficient sugarcane ethanol converts only 0.2 percent of the energy in the sun into usable energy even optimistically uh switchgrass or cellulosic ethanol would be only 0.35 percent by contrast right now off the you can get 20 efficiency from from photovoltaics right off the shelf and basically that means we can produce 100 times more usable energy using solar means than bioenergy and therefore any significant increase in bioenergy makes these goals impossible so lesson two reductions in consumption growth are critical lesson three is there's no free land you look at all kinds of global strategies and everyone wants to claim that they're going to use tropical pasture land so we use tropical pasture land for reforestation we're going to use it for to make more wood from plantations we're going to use it for bioenergy but the reality is that we're we need about an 80 percent increase in meat or beef that's the projection and even if we hold down our beef consumption we need to double the pasture of every a hectare in brazil as example because we can't produce that much more food on dry land so this land is already spoken for uh uh similarly people sometimes think well we can use abandoned agricultural land right so the kind of low carbon land as opposed to more active agricultural land but in fact abandoned agricultural land uh reforests and is critical so here's a map for example of latin america what happened in 2001 2010 you have this deforestation in red but you have reforestation in blue and globally for every two hectares of land we deforest we abandon one hectare of land probably roughly we're not 100 sure that reforest so if we use that abandoned agricultural land for other purposes we're going to double the rate of global deforestation on a net basis and so for example you'll see papers that say well look we have all this available land for palm plantations it is obviously much better to go into this type of land than this type of land for a palm plantation but in fact if you look at these lands these are lands that we also need to reforest and we'll reforest if we don't use them for agricultural use so what we really need is to increase the yields uh as and hold down demand no land is free and you saw papers that claimed that woody savannas were free there was a paper in fact partially authored by the FAO claiming that all of this area in in in africa was essentially free land for bioenergy or increasing crop production that land looks like this it looks like this and in fact it's got a lot extremely biodiverse has a lot of carbon i did a paper in 2015 that showed that this was not in fact low carbon land for food production or for bioenergy you can follow that up okay so no free land so we need we need yield increases and that's critical but here's the wicked problem we know that frequently when you increase yields you get more land shifting and more land clearing locally so in brazil for example we've had increases in maize yields increases in soybean yields and we've also had expansion of agricultural land in brazil why is that because of course that puts brazil in a better competitive situation and those yield gains are critical to saving land globally but they also contribute to this shifting which is clearing more land locally and that means more carbon rich land that means immediate carbon losses that means biodiversity effects and so yield gain what this means is yield gains alone don't necessarily protect forests and that's particularly true as we're on a road building binge around the world and as you build roads through forest you get a shifting of agricultural land into clearing new forests while abandoning land elsewhere and if we have a this is kind of potential roads from a study in in big roads in africa if you build all those roads there's no way we're going to protect the world's forest so the lesson four is while production increasing yields on the same land is critical unless those are explicitly linked through governance to protection of forests it's not going to work that implies there's a global deal to be made where the whole world has a stake in helping to boost yields in developing countries but in return those developing countries have to use them to protect forests so this last couple of comments one challenge in doing this is we have all kinds of perverse uh accounting rules that reward people in climate change for either the wrong activity or not sufficient activity so for example under national laws countries don't get any kind of incentive they don't get any reward for reducing their consumption unless they reduce their production so if countries switch to more um uh less beef diets they're not rewarded for reducing greenhouse gas emissions unless they reduce their production globally so that's not enough companies are saying we're going to buy from recently before from land that isn't been recently deforested and that's good but in fact unless they boost yields on existing land all they're going to do is move agricultural land around we have a perverse rule that basically treats all biomass as carbon neutral meaning that it does if you burn biomass instead of coal that's viewed as being and not adding carbon to the atmosphere and that explains why you have people proposing to double commercial wood harvest to produce two percent of the world's energy and that similarly is a view that well what if we only burn the amount of growth that's occurring in forests uh than that's carbon neutral but in fact the growth of forests a lot of it is due to higher carbon dioxide concentrations to higher nitrogen that is a beneficial feedback from climate change itself that's holding down climate change and if we in fact burn up that carbon sink we're still adding carbon to the atmosphere so i'll just leave you with this thought this is a map of the potential productivity of native vegetation in the world how much carbon it takes up per year and uh we haven't improved on that human activity has lowered that we're roughly stuck with that amount of global land use productivity we can improve yields so we don't diminish it as much we but basically that is the amount of units of potential plant growth we have in the world and we have to get more carbon storage we need to have more food and the only way to do both is to make more efficient use of land and so we need rules that basically encourage that more efficient use of land and i'll leave it there thank you very much tim for sharing these insights and very clear points for thoughts and for need for urgent action um i would like to invite directly pair to come in and provide the perspective from the from the follow looking at the the whole food systems and to pick up uh from where tim left us with uh with the overview on uh on land use requirements and the needs to really look at efficiency pair over to you thank you astrey and thank you tim for an excellent kickoff um and good morning to everyone thank you to fowl for hosting and thank you for inviting me to be part of such an distinct panel the first test of course is whether i'm actually able to share my screen so um essentially i am going to try and introduce you to the key findings of the food and land use global consultation for food and land use coalition global consultation report i want to emphasize that while i'm i'm back in my day job with norwich and clinton forest initiative i am now speaking with my folder uh hat on um another caution up front this is a global report the findings the conclusions the numbers they are global it'll break down differently um in different countries in different regions um and if you want to have a clear picture of how this would work in a specific country you need to actually do the analytics on the synthesis country specific but we feel that the global picture gives a good good glimpse of what is needed um i'd also add that there's there's no new science uh in this we're essentially basing ourselves on ipcc ipus various stuff on on nutrition tims and the world bank wri report that tim just introduced it to and and so on and the aim is to look at what is actually needed to go from here to there in terms of the economics the finance the policy and so on the exam question that food and land use coalition asked itself in initiating the work on this report is how can we how can we deliver on the food and land use system stj simultaneously that is that is the key because we know that there are food security issues there are rural development and growth issues there are health issues climate biodiversity nature issues um and we know that if we fail to deliver on either one of them we will fail on all so the basic exam question is can we deliver on these goals simultaneously through the same reform agenda the basic answer to that is yes as the report aims to to demonstrate we can have better environment in terms of food and land use systems actually being net carbon neutral um drastically reducing and then halting biodiversity loss restoring fish stocks etc this can be done by eliminating under nutrition and having the disease burden associated with too many calories um it can also help boost income growth for the bottom 20 percent of rural populations globally and increase increased food security significantly for everyone but most particularly for the most vulnerable poorest parts of the global population so it is possible to deliver on all these goals unfortunately that's definitely not where we are heading if you look at this slide it essentially takes the approach of hidden costs meaning costs that are incurred by food and land use systems but not really financed directly by those that create them if you look at the left column that is status code 2018 hidden costs related to obesity in 2.7 trillion under nutrition 1.8 trillion pollution 2.1 climate change 1.5 etc so what we've essentially tried is to put conservative pricing estimates on on these hidden costs for example in climate change we've used a social cost of carbon of 100 dollars per tonne which is arguably too low but still and similarly throughout these categories the number is so big that it's it's a bit hard to relate to but this is more than the GDP of China as comparison it is also more than the net GDP of the system as such meaning our food and land use systems are really if you take every consequence into account net negative for the global economy that obviously does not mean we should stop producing food but it does mean that there are enormous costs that are pushed onto other sectors especially health sectors and productivity sectors and into the future through climate change and nature loss even more discouraging is that if you look at the path going forward what we tried to do was to model two scenarios the second column the middle column is current trends that is essentially a relatively sanguine businesses usual scenarios so moderate reforms that leaves us with growing hidden costs which means for example that the Paris climate change targets will be out of reach similarly on all the other counts the alternative that we modeled is a radical reform scenario which we turned better futures and as we can see there is a drastic already by 2030 a drastic reduction in the hidden costs by more than 5 trillion annually and that trend continues towards 2050 the question of course is how do we realize this better futures scenario and what we tried to do is to outline the reform scenario that would deliver on the assumptions that we used to model the better futures scenario and we show you can obviously organize these reform agendas different ways we chose to organize them around 10 critical transitions starting organized in a pyramid as you can see on this slide essentially starting with healthy diet because the demand side of this is absolutely crucial so this is about a convergence of global diets to healthier for human and healthier for the planet that means for example and in the western north will have to reduce significantly meat consumption and especially red meat consumption it means generally a global higher consumption of fruits and vegetables generally a global reduction in salt and sugar consumption and so on the point is convergence around a diet that is good for humans and good for the environment there is no time to go through all of these critical transitions but the key point is that this is not an a la carte menu it's a set menu you actually have to on a global scale all of these times have to be delivered on for the purposes of the day of course the third one protecting and restoring nature is absolutely key there is no scenario in the IPCC that gets us to the Paris Agreement targets without halting the destruction of nature and deforestation particularly yesterday so that has to happen very rapidly but as Tim pointed out to do that you also need more productive regenerative agriculture you need to extract more value from the oceans while keeping it healthy there's a massive issue around reducing food loss and waste etc so this is one integrated agenda I would also emphasize that especially in a developing world and around the tropics where most of the forest loss is currently ongoing the lower to stronger rural livelihoods which is essentially investments in infrastructure transport digital energy infrastructure is absolutely crucial to succeed as is the issue of gender and democracy which boils down in a large to a large degree to investing heavily in women's and girls education health including reproductive health and access to finance the upside of course is is massive as it's on the previous slide there is also a very intriguing business opportunity estimated about five trillion annually income this costs money the investment requirements are estimated at 300 to 350 billion each year for the transformation that's about half a percent of global GDP I believe very significant investment but the point is that the IRR is one to 15 or something like that so that this is a very profitable investment but it is a high investment and that means the financial component is clearly crucial financial innovation the report is quite detailed on recommendations because this requires some massive changes in how we organize this is about actors from governments to individuals to companies to civil society taking fundamentally different choices from today in terms of what how we do things what our demand is on the on foods and what we invest in and how we produce um that kind of fundamental change in such a short time span requires incentive to change in the fundamental way there's no time to go through all of them I I do uh really uh encourage you to to read a report I'll look here quickly at those recommendations that are most directly relevant to the land use side putting your price on carbon of course repurposing agricultural subsidies and this is really important we're talking repurposing not cutting but repurposing these subsidies to drive nutrition and nature-friendly diets and production scaling up payments for ecosystem services I think this is absolutely crucial unless we get used to the idea that nature provides services just like police departments do and the health service does we also need to realize that protecting and restoring nature costs money and and that is going to have to be paid for red plus is perhaps the most ready-to-go example of this and the report recommends a massive upscaling of of pay for performance red plus nature protection is crucial and the report recommends a moratorium on conversion to natural ecosystems protecting fishing breeding grounds and ending illegal and overfishing there is also strong recommendations on legal rights and recognition of indigenous peoples territories and tackling environmental climate again if you look only on the protection and restoration of nature the cost is estimated to closer to 65 billion so let's say 0.7 trillion in a decade that's a lot of money and it might scare some observers off but compare that to the 11.5 trillion estimated costs of COVID-19 economic damages and the fairly strong evidence that destruction of nature is a key driver of pandemics and you put the sums in the perspective and the other side of course is the return is actually higher the point is we have to change the rules to enable governments and businesses to realize the values that are inherent inherent in nature one last point before I close as Tim pointed out there is no free land and how we use land is absolutely essential to whether this succeeds and the difference between many of the outcomes in better futures versus current trend scenario you can see in the top two portions of these columns it has to do with undercurrent trends more land will be converted to pasture and cropland meaning nature will continue to disappear while in better futures through reduced food loss and waste through changes in diets and through more efficient production you free up 1.5 billion hectares of agricultural land that can be returned to nature that is a crucial element of this reform agenda and it drives of course the biodiversity outcomes and the climate outcomes in a massively positive direction the food and land use coalition has sort of also tried to get to the bottom of why isn't this happening and and the the existence of pervasive myths is crucial and perhaps the most pervasive one is we must choose between economic growth enough nutritious food and environmental sustainability what we think we show in this report is that that is simply wrong there is no macro level trade-off of course there is always micro level trade-offs individual actors facing the choice between cutting down forest and and producing they are facing a choice but you have to compensate those people's pay for ecosystem services and change the rules but at the macro level we can have better production and better protection at the same time and transformed food and land use systems can deliver on all of the SDGs including SDG 2 on zero hunger while also delivering on environmental targets and the Paris Agreement and I think that's the key takeaway from this report technically financially technologically in terms of the economics we can deliver on all of these all of these targets it's essentially a question of political will and political momentum thank you for your attention thank you very much pair for sharing these insights and I think it's been it's been great to have this very comprehensive global picture and you've reinforced the message from from Tim that really we have urgency and that this is a tool order but you're also concluding on the fact that it's possible and in fact even though investment requirements are enormous this is a very worthwhile investment that we need to make into our future and I think picking up from your point about the fact that the global picture is one thing but there may be we're looking towards hopefully no macro no trade-offs at the macro level but at the micro level there are much more difficult decisions to make I think this is a fantastic moment then to turn over directly to to Dr Agus Justianto from Indonesia to give us a perspective from a specific country from Indonesia to show how this is confronted at the country level how some of these challenges are both both assess and how the strategies are put in place to meet multiple goals and to manage some of these trade-offs and pursue the synergies and the impact at country level so Dr Justianto I'd like to invite you to take the floor thank you yeah thank you Astrid yeah I would like to share the screen good afternoon ladies and gentlemen I would like to present the presentation entitled Indonesia's policies sorry I would like to yeah Indonesia policies on forestry sector addressing food security and environmental sustainability yeah I would like to see that the the path to zero hunger by 2030 of FAO we know that four in five poor people live in rural areas and then a large share of food produce is lost or wasted and malnutrition affects one in three people and all nations and then over 820 million people are going hungry and increasing competition for natural natural resources and of course demand for food will grow and by the year 2030 world population is projected to grow to around 8.3 billion and we have to transform our food system to transform our world Indonesia have a corrective measure for sustainable forest and ecosystem management through ensuring significant reduction in the rate of deforestation and forest and degradation and then preventing forest and land fires and addressing their negative impacts on the environment health transportation and economic growth and we have also to applying the principle of environmental support and carrying capacity in the utilization of forest areas and we also have a global cooperation to tackle climate change through an NDC commitment by reducing greenhouse gases emission through our own effort and with international assistance and also the involving community participation in access to forest management and assigning responsibility to all parties involved so that forest areas and their ecosystem are protected by that Indonesia has taken corrective action first implementing low carbon development and resilience to climate change through conservation restoration and sustainable management forest and land rehabilitation and reduction of deforestation rate and second changing the direction of forest management from focusing on timber to timber to forest resource ecosystem and community base and then applying community base forest management by providing access to forest management to communities through social forestry and conservation partnership and then resolving conflict related to forest tenure cases and providing legal land access to communities through the land object program for agrarian reform we call it TORA and then we do also internalizing the principle of environmental support and carrying capacity into the preparation of the national forestry plan as a macro special direction for forestry development and then we also preventing biodiversity loss and damage to ecosystem through conservation of the area and protection of the endangered biodiversity and lastly we are preventing mitigating and restoring damage to natural resources and the environment. Indonesia policies on food security we have a social forestry program social forestry permit and also food estate program for social forestry program we guarantee management rights to people who live in and around the forest especially forest farmers who be able to acquire food through agrarian forestry while managing forest and also forest farmer group will also receive assistance from government to develop their business obtain funding and access to market regarding the social forestry permit we social forestry permit given to utilize forest in the walking area in management unit as September 2020 there is a 6673 permits have been issued for around 870,000 families which offer 4.2 million hectares regarding the food estate program in we do in selected and degraded lands and the food estate program is a base on population capital intensive program which involves local communities by improving their capacities the government in Indonesia also has allocated 12.7 million hectares of forest land for social forestry program we we we given permits through the schemes we call it file village forest community forest people plantation forest customary forest forestry partnership we also develop new strategies have been applied in response to COVID-19 pandemic to support forest farmer for example through bank persona we give an incentive to be given to social forestry group if they implement the e-learning outcomes in their business working working plan by selecting cluster of forest and food commodities and then through the national economic recovery program we provide around 200 million rupiah or around 13 000 for 450 us dollar to each social forestry business group with aim to achieve food security through developing a group forestry and providing productive economic tools regarding the local wisdom we provide also education to social forestry farmers and then through the e-learning we encourage farmers to do to think not egocentrically but egocentrically by simultaneously conveying both productive base and ecological views yeah community program empowerment program in conservation areas as already conducted through the development of conservation village granting granting access and then partnership facilitation recognizing f o work on food system transformation so we do the support food system transformation to prevent land use change and reduce deforestation through the strengthen innovation system for example green and smart technology to produce high value and then also involve communities and small holders to and improve their capacities to enhance productivity and income reduce losses and courage reduce and recycle and promote sustainable consumption we do also facilitation access to productive resources finance and services and we encourage the diversification of production on income we utilize an optimized degraded lands and adapt to climate change and of course strengthen coordination amongst stakeholders i thank you very much thank you very much indeed for presenting this clear case from from indonesia and really the breadth of different initiatives that you're undertaking to deal with the challenge of deforestation and looking at the the needs for for what needs to be put in place in terms of a food system and and meeting the various sdgs and of course hunger food security and poverty goals thank you also for highlighting the importance of this opportunity now in terms of building back better and using what is a very difficult period as a as also a starting block to look at how to use the recovery planning and a way to set a new path and i think this is something we are we are very much thinking throughout these these events and i think it's a very worthwhile point to for us to keep in mind and but in view of time i will quickly turn over to our discussions and starting with leslie leslie you've taken a close look at some of the global reports and clothing those that were already presented today and you've also had many years of experience in supporting countries and um what are your thoughts in terms of how realistic these scenarios are in terms of getting the broad transformation um off the ground and ensuring a smooth transition also towards what should be a more sustainable new normal leslie thank you can you hear me very well okay good um thank you these are great presentations they're great studies they really add tremendous to our understanding tremendous amount i will take the very short time that i have though to mostly talk about what i see as the shortcomings or things that could be added as opposed to the really interesting and excellent work that is in there so first thing pair i like that you make of such a strong statement that yeah we can get environmental nutritional and equitable livelihood the equitable development all these things there isn't a trade-off at the macro level we can get them and yeah i i actually agree but i think it's a lot more than just saying we need then a separate sort of parallel path for development and that i think overall one of the main issues with some of these food system transformation studies is they don't integrate enough the implications for rural livelihoods and we care about that because 80 percent of the people in extreme poverty 80 percent of the half billion people in extreme poverty and 76 percent of the medium poverty are in rural areas and they're still dependent to some extent on very low productivity and unstable agricultural livelihoods it also matters for deforestation although we all know i think pretty much that poverty is not it's a complicated relationship with deforestation but you care about it for the livelihoods and you care about it for deforestation and i think it needs to be a little more specific in looking at the constraints that are coming out in getting better food system transformation so if you put a hard constraint on all agricultural land expansion around the world how many more people would be in poverty i'd like to see a statistic like that i mean we see a lot about what it would mean for emissions what would the opposite mean if you put this constraint on how many more poor people are going to see and um in terms of the global versus local fine i mean that's fair enough that these are global reports but i still think looking it would be useful particularly in this context of the rural livelihoods and equity to look at distributional impacts so the implications of putting a constraint again i'm going to stick with the land use expansion because the focus here the implications of that for around the world are very different the cost and the cost of livelihoods the cost to and also say the benefits you would get from the land as tim showed in that last slide i mean there's a huge variation in the across geographies of what you're going to get on the environment side but also what you're going to cause on the livelihood side and there's a there's an equity argument that you would be putting in constraints to meet environmental problems that haven't been caused by poor people but that would affect them and so i think at least that needs to be much more directly and specifically in the big messaging of like yes this everybody has to work together on this but it doesn't mean everybody has the same cost to deal with it in terms of solutions let me see okay i have a couple more minutes in terms of solutions the sustainable ag intensification is a big one and there's very interesting stuff in the two reports and also just in some of the ideas that was put forward from Indonesia i would say though at least i'd propose to you guys it's probably not going to work as a strategy a short-term strategy you get a lot of people out of poverty that are in rural areas right now and where there is also a projected high rates of population growth because it takes time to get the institutions in place it takes time to get the environmental services and ecosystems in a new and a new equilibrium and we have experience that shows that you know we haven't had great adoption rates it's very complicated to get it to work so and value chains is another one that's come up in all the reports and in the Indonesia study which has a lot of promise for short-term employment gains so in terms of closing up my remarks one of the things is i just want to really emphasize that the issue of rural livelihoods should be absolutely integrated in the dynamics of food system transformation so changing in the consumption patterns changing in the agricultural land use patterns changing in agriculture production systems so not as a separate pillar and in reading through the reports and also just listening to the presentation just now on Indonesia i think one of the things we're seeing is a move from looking at homogeneity and production systems homogeneity and value change so we want to level fields we want to use a standardized set of inputs we monocrop and then we have a standardized set of vegetables for product standards to go through our value chains and now we're moving much more to heterogeneity we want we we have much more heterogeneity in the fields we deal with intercropping we deal with different kinds of soil types and management and same thing in the value chains and so one of the things is to look at but one of the reasons we haven't dealt where we've pushed on homogeneity is because there's lower cost and you can mechanize dealing with heterogeneity means labor and it could be high productivity labor with new technologies and this is an area i think that comes out without being fully articulated in some of the reports we'll stop there thank you very much Leslie for putting the strong emphasis on the importance of livelihoods and having to deal with this this transition and transformation narrative in a way that makes it real and and ensures a just transition really at the at the local level and so coming in with a with a complementary perspective i'd like to call on uh Sacher Dibora from the World Economic Forum who's been looking at a lot again at the global site and how to really get the incentives right in order to move to a comprehensive new scenario so Sacher Dibora may I call on you to come in thank you Astrid and thank you to the speakers the panelists for a very interesting perspective i think most of the presentations have today highlighted that we require a fundamental change in the way our food is produced including the practices of more than 500 million smaller the farmers and the way food is consumed which is around seven more than seven billion individuals currently and to create that huge shift every the panelists have alluded to we really need to look at the role of incentives i mean the current incentives that are put in place are haven't put in place decades back when the world look very different but now to transition that we need to see who's going to fund the transition cost economic cost the behavior change cost but also look at perverse incentives that are preventing participants in food system from changing their behavior and and of course we we know the role of private sector will be key here which i haven't heard much in today's discussion but we know that multi-stakeholder partnerships such as Tropical Forest Alliance have been trying to support the implementation of private sector commitments but has progress has been slow because there's a lack of incentives for producers or countries who are trying to do the right thing or willing to forego the opportunity cost but don't have incentives to do so so at the world economic forum earlier this year we launched a report looking at how do we incentivize food systems transformation and we currently highlighted around four big incentive pathways and i'm going to go into this in quickly and just pull out a few messages from that report so the first pathway and probably the hardest to do is to shift consumer demand to environmentally social uh environmentally and socially responsible products which is happening in developed countries but very minor still and because to change consumer behavior requires is which is deeply rooted in habit and culture is requires also to address afford affordability of these choices especially in low-income environment so the second pathway that we highlighted is on business model innovation where private sector should redesign business model to prioritize environmental social and financial outcomes which we call a triple bottom line benefits and many of the companies are recognizing their future competitiveness hinges on meeting these commitments and also a lot of evidence shows that a high level of purpose leads to high level of profitability so then why is the pace and scale not meeting up to what we aspire for and i think one of the key reasons we highlighted is of course a lack of enable infrastructure that we hear about quite a bit investments in roads and sports supply chain challenges but also one of the main things that we heard also is that the triple bottom line business models sometimes do not meet the economic return aspirations for the private sector so frequently the increased cost of changing these business models cannot be offset by increasing demand or price shift so what are the mechanisms can we put in place like for example in the short term which can provide this incentive so example like co-investments or subsidized financing and of course we also see that there are huge risks to changing business models which large companies are unwilling to do so and startups and entrepreneurs who are willing to do so don't have the funding to do so and this also requires a lot of change in corporate culture which requires us to redesign of internal performance metrics but also to look at how do we include externalities in financial performance assessments of private sector bottom lines which really brings us to the third pathway which is the role of institutional investors including say private equity or pension funds and others who can set really high standards with respect to how companies can target environmental and social outcomes alongside profits and we see that the sustainable investing has become quite a big mechanism now and because investors are trying to address climate risk in their returns on assets but this money is not being funding it's not being unlocked to food and agriculture sector because they're for a variety of reasons and first of all being that the hurdle rates for investments in food and agriculture is quite high the returns do not compensate for the perceived risk which can be mitigated through blended financing and other mechanisms and also in developing countries because there's fragmentation of food systems and a huge associated transaction cost there are lack of also intermediation vehicles for example credible funds or green bonds that can attract investment in sustainable food products and of course there's a huge question of lack of data and decision making which can sort of guide decision making and of course we need to enabling environment also countries need to invest in ownership rights legal frameworks and so forth to make this happen which brings me to the food and probably the most important pathway and that's the actions of governments from the local to the national which can be a huge powerful driver in because realigning policies and public sector investments governments can change the economics the drive companies investors and farmers but there is of course we heard about that there is the governments have to balance a lot of priorities economic social national security and a lot of times they don't have the tools to do so they don't have the talent tools or the research on what are the impact of interventions that could work what are the tradeoffs and so we do need some capacity building in governments financing for capacity building in for governments to develop this incentive related you know tradeoff decisions that governments have to make and and and one thing I wanted to mention as per se they said there is no macro level tradeoffs but there is micro level tradeoffs as Leslie also alluded to so this requires a significant transition cost at realigning public policies so a lot of the high food prices will affect vulnerable segments of the population it may lead to loss of income for some set of growers in a country so we need to really create a social safety net to compensate and protect the vulnerable segments of and population so just to highlight at the end I think all of those four pathways that is consumer demand change institutional investments business model innovation innovations or public policies they are interconnected and we need progress against all four to realign incentives again there would be tradeoffs there are transition cost making this change and so there is not one size fits all approach so each country and region needs to adopt a bespoke approach that will involve setting transition goals and choosing which incentive pathway and actions are aligned to those goals and then putting forward some mutually reinforcing actions which requires them to walk across government ministries and departments and to sequence this appropriately both at the individual actor country regional and global level and in this of course as we have seen the role of multi stakeholder partnerships with the key we need coalitions of governments private sector civil society bilateral multilateral organizations donors to create a collective action to solve these really big wicked problems as we call it and also the last thing I would like to say and which I think a lot of the FAO paper and others have highlighted the role of technology innovations will be key but we cannot think that technology is a panacea in itself we really look at need to look at how do we create the innovation ecosystems that can leverage the role of technology in the country and regions so with that I hand it over to you Astrid. Thank you very much and because we are really very tight with time I will hand over without further ado to Jamie and just note that of course there I think the link to the reports also paste it in the post it in the chat rather so Jamie please for the kind of big picture perspective as the director of food systems from FAO what are you adding what would you like to add to this picture. Great thanks very much Astrid and I think just in terms of wrapping up what we've seen is that the interventions today provide some very solid evidence and insights into the key issues that are challenging many of our contemporary food systems particularly in terms of their hidden costs but also in terms of the crisis that will result we continue to follow the business as usual trajectory I think as we've also seen there being a lot of we have a pretty good idea of the potential solutions or at least the elements of the solutions as set out in the menus that we've seen presented to us today but I think that the key question is how do we make this all happen what are the combinations of the items from the menu that are appropriate in a particular context and I think it is that that local level that we really do see the trade-offs and the prioritization needing to be thought through how do we foster the level of coordinated action and investment required from actors across the food system to ensure that real progress is made where it's needed and I think what yeah what what is is clear from the presentations as well is that technical innovations alone will not move us in the right direction quickly enough we need much more focus on behavioral change as Saswati has argued and this is not just changes in decisions and practices at the producer level but we need to be looking at better understanding and incentivizing change of all actors in a way that forces or encourages at least coordinated action and as a result we can't only look for solutions to problems close to where the negative impacts are being manifested for example in the discussion today which has been very much about how we might regulate restrict certain land use practices to reduce levels of deforestation or ecosystem degradation also encourage practices that generate nature positive outcomes but but looking at these solutions close to the source may may miss some of the more effective efficient ways of working towards transformative change for example how can we work to change the sourcing practices of processors or galvanize the change in consumer demand for products which are produced in a certain way this ultimately may provide more leverage in reducing levels of land conversion or incentivizing a shift towards sustainable production than focusing on the sort of land use policies but of course almost by definition taking a more systemic approach brings an added level of complexity so how do we work through this in an inclusive multi-stakeholder setting where the priorities of all stakeholders have heard and I think Leslie made a very important point that it's often the inclusiveness of those more vulnerable groups generally in rural areas that we really miss in setting this agenda and I see two or a number of upcoming opportunities but I'd just like to close by highlighting two of those the first is that there are a number of major programs of work that are coming into alignment with the the food system summit process one of these is the jet seven impact program on food systems which I think will provide a significant platform for articulating and implementing a food system approach and addressing many of the critical issues that have been discussed today and the second of course is that over the next 12 months we had the process towards the UN food system summit which is intended to really elevate this level of discourse and assist in finding the required level of alignment between stakeholders throughout food systems the decision to convene the summit recognizes that it is the integrated nature of the sustainable development goals and this is very much reflected in the the way in which its five action tracks have been developed one of those focus very much on the the promotion of nature positive solutions but it's that integration across consumer demand across advancing rural livelihoods improving resilience which I think will really help to move this agenda forward so thank you Astrid thank you very much Damian thank you for already really tying together the various insights from speakers and we are unfortunately incredibly out of time and already over time and so I will just wrap up very briefly by thanking all the presenters and discussions for what was an incredibly rich one hour event we will take what we've learned from here and we'll bring that into discussions in the next week's cofo discussion as well as in these upcoming major events and the global and national consultation processes that lead hopefully to all of us being able to support a transition towards sustainable food systems so thank you very much and goodbye


Hello, this is Comet Weinberger and I'm a freelance editor for Inago and today I'm going to give you a few tips about how to reference the best way to reference your publication manuscript. When you're writing a publication manuscript the most important question to answer is do I need one? Meaning a reference. And to answer that question in anticipation of being asked. So keep in mind what references are for in a publication. In Mind Hue, they have two purposes. One is support and the other is illumination or explanation.