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On May 6th 2022 a dialogue session on Healthy and Sustainable Diets was held under the Annual World Food Summit hosted by Denmark and the Danish Minister for Food, Agriculture and Fisheries Mr. Rasmus Prehn.
The dialogue session built on the commitments made at the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021 and served to contribute to the future actions of the Coalition by exploring the vast potentials of two key Danish strongholds; food-based dietary guidelines (FBDGs) and public-private partnerships (PPPs) as solutions to enable the transition to healthy and climate-friendly diets form sustainable food systems.
A contribution to the goals of the HDSFS Coalition
The session contributed to the goals of the HDSFS Coalition by mobilizing and coordinating existing expertise and stakeholders to align action across the food system for collective impact at the country level. The session gave examples on how to unleash the potentials of FBDGs and incorporate sustainability as a critical policy instrument to influence various food systems actors. Another focus of the session was public-private partnerships (PPPs) as a key tool to bring key stakeholders together to create the momentum needed to deliver on the goals.
The session also provided inspiration as to how countries can manage and incorporate food system indicators to report on their National Declared Commitments to the Paris Agreement and thereby actively report on climate goals. Lastly, the session facilitated peer-to-peer learning by providing best practice examples and challenges that are relevant and applicable for countries across the globe.
Inputs to the three main focus areas in the HDSFS coalition
The six speakers from four different continents representing the UN, NGOs, private sector, government and academia brought forward important inputs to advance the three main areas of effort in the HDSFS coalition: Food supply, Food Environments and Valuing Foods.
When talking about actions that increase the supply of foods needed to support healthy diets from sustainable food systems, it is not enough to talk about incremental change. Efforts are needed to create significant change with respect to the foot print that food systems have on the climate and environment.
Improving food environments and enable actions that support healthy diets from sustainable food systems through enhancing the institutional, physical, price, informational and policy environments where people procure their food, is equally important. Demand creation comes in as an important aspect to influence food environments as the majority of people know what is good for them but don’t act on it.
Demand creation is also useful to influence how people value foods and how to define actions to motivate, empower and enable everyone, everywhere to have the agency to acquire, prepare and eat healthy diets produced by using environmentally sustainable practices.
Nobody can do everything but everybody can do Something
The session ended with the notion that nobody can do everything but everybody can do something and that collaboration is key when addressing the complex issues of food systems transformations towards healthy and sustainable diets.
You can watch the full recording here.