"Education and inclusion of women is very important for systemic change"

1. How does your ideal sustainable food system look like in the context of your country/region of expertise?

The ideal sustainable food system to me would be one where the Rights of Local stakeholders is recognized in their environment where they are able to self-determine how they produce and consume nutritious food with the ultimate objective of ‘well-being’.

Food system will need to sustain livelihood of the diversity of communities and sectors because food systems cater to sustaining the farming and non-farming communities.

Generally, the impulse or ultimate objective behind the construction of the food systems need to be rethought. Food systems need to be anchored in sustaining the livelihoods of the stakeholders in their environment as close as possible and the rights to exist for not only humans but also for plants and animals need to be considered.

2. Can you share with us your experience of supporting changes/transitions towards sustainable food systems in a country/region? 

I have two experiences on this:

The first relates to my PhD thesis on the ‘Land reform in Vietnam’ – it was on land reforms in 1980s about smallholder farmers and how the government gave back land to smallholder farmers. Vietnamese took broad approach to rural diversification and promotion of smallholder livelihoods through access to lands, which was a scarce resource. All value chain and diversification was supported that resulted in impressive achievements in reducing poverty, sustaining livelihoods and wellbeing. Strong movements with education reforms accompanied this. In Vietnam, two key policies that underpinned food systems towards being more inclusive and redistribute wealth was land reform and education reform policies. I think education and inclusion of women is very important for systemic change.

The second was more recently, I worked on a social protection, food and nutrition security program in Niger. This was a cash transfer program in response to drought and other economic shocks such as Covid19. Funded by UNICEF, it had a component on nutrition security that looked at production of infant food nutrients. Factories producing infant foods were linked to women groups producing the raw materials (locally) that created employment opportunities, boosted income and ensured availability and access to nutritious food. Therefore, the social protection was more like a cash plus transfer that provided other services such as capacity building for groups of women on nutritional programs and rotational credit saving schemes among members. Several actors were involved and was in-line with the government policy on enhancing access to nutritious food for infants and the strategy on establishing these factories at the local level. The challenge was on the intersectionality between the nutrition sector and the social protection sector. In order for people to have access to nutrition, income poverty was a bottleneck and social protection was a solution to address the income constraints. Also just having income does not guarantee nutrition, so the two systems of social protection and nutrition has to be unpacked and repacked.

3. In your view, what are the key triggers and success factors for change to happen? 

Different teams and stakeholders need to work together to bring real change in implementation. Strong leadership to incentivize the change at various levels is important. Leadership however is a big terminology, but more in terms of accountability and legitimacy of public policy. The political economy of policy formulation and implementation is key, but this is much more complicated.

For change to take place, one must understand how ‘policy choice’ is made - by whom and for whom. Influencing policy making through participatory action research conducted by local researchers (who understand the context) in terms of identifying technological needs (which needs to be driven by demand rather than proposed by the policy makers) is also needed. The choice of policy has to be relevant in the eyes of the beneficiaries. There is a need to change the how which will tell the real what needs to change, rather than the general situation where the what is decided way ahead. Actors need to be supported in system changes because the system is individually dependent.