03-08-2021

tUeSDAY, AUgUSt 3, 2021
5
Science key to food system overhaul
DAnn okoth
Science and innovation must be at the
centre of global food system
transformation to drive sustainable
agricultural productivity and ensure
food security and better nutrition for
all, a UN meeting has heard.Speakers
at the UN Food Systems Pre-Summit in
Rome, Italy, this week also called for
more political goodwill towards
adopting science-based, pro-poor
policies for tackling challenges in the
global agri-food sector to avert an
imminent global food crisis.
Commenting from the sidelines of
the summit on Wednesday, Claudia
Sadoff, managing director of research
delivery and impact at global research
organisation CGIAR, said food systems
must not only produce enough to feed a
growing population, but also address
rising levels of malnutrition with
increasingly scarce natural resources.
"We must move food systems from a
carbon source to a carbon sink, while
also providing decent livelihoods for
farmers, producers and all actors
across the value chain," Sadoff said.
"Science and innovation can help
realise the vision of global food futures
that resolve the complex and
interconnected challenges we face
today - including climate, conflict and
COVID-19."
She added that "we are already
making progress in this direction",
citing the recently launched One Health
Research, Education and Outreach
Centre in Africa. OHRECA brings
A farmer showing off results of a poor harvest of maize due to drought.
together science and research spanning
human, animal and environmental
health to address issues such as food
safety, foodborne illnesses and
sustainable livestock.
This week's talks from 26 to 28 July
are a precursor to the main UN Food
Systems Summit in September - called
in 2019 by UN Secretary-General
Antonio Guterres with the aim of
encouraging action towards the
Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs) and driving collaboration to
transform the way the world produces,
consumes and thinks about food.
While the UN pledged to put science
Photo: Pablo tosco
at the centre of any summit outcomes,
more than 300 global civil society
organisations of small-scale food
producers, researchers and indigenous
communities boycotted the three-day
event, and held an alternative presummit
in tandem. They say the UN
event has been compromised by a "topdown
exclusion of many food systems
actors", claims that organisers have
strongly denied.
The discussions take place in the
backdrop of the UN's grim State of
Food Security and Nutrition in the
World report, published this month,
which says that up to 811 million people
people globally are undernourished -
with rising hunger levels exacerbated
by COVID-19, conflicts and climate
change.
According to Loretta HieberGirardet,
chief of the risk knowledge, monitoring
and capacity development branch at
the United Nations Office for Disaster
Risk Reduction (UNDRR), there is an
urgent need to adopt novel and
innovative approaches in tackling
disaster risk, especially in the agri-food
sector.
Addressing a session on the theme of
"climate, food security and COVID-19,
challenges and opportunities",
HieberGirardet said the world was
faced with unprecedented uncertainty,
complexity and volatility, adding: "It is
against this backdrop that the food
systems need to be transformed to be
agile so that they can be resilient."
To this end, she said, better
management of disasters and climate
risk is at the core of achieving food
systems transformation towards 2030.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a stark
reminder that disastrous events are not
confined to one sector, location and
community, but can rapidly transform
into cross-border disasters with global
long-lasting effects on social, ecological
and economic systems, HieberGirardet
added.
Agriculture is disproportionately
impacted by disasters, with the sector
absorbing 23 per cent of all damages
from natural disasters, said Girardet,
citing UN agency data. This rises to 26
per cent in case of climate change and
up to 80 per cent in case of drought.
"There is need for a radical shift in the
way we perceive, manage and prevent
disasters and climate risk in our food
systems," she added."A good place to
start would be to implement the Sendai
framework, which is the global
blueprint for disaster risk
management. Unfortunately, we are
not on track to meet the goals, just as
we're not on track to implement the
Paris agreement or the SDGs."
Science and innovation were also
singled out as the tools to transform the
livestock sector, which is often vilified
as being unsustainable and a
contributor to global warming.
Peter Vadas, national program leader
at the US Department of Agriculture's
Agricultural Research Service, says
more innovative ways to sustainably
produce livestock and livestock
products were increasingly being
deployed.
"Innovation is key in animal
agriculture," he said. "And increasingly,
scientific methods are being applied to
ensure feeds and pasture are produced
more sustainably, and fewer antibiotics
and inputs are used."
UN summit aims to tackle food
insecurity following COVID-19
South Africa's President cyril ramaphosa joins healthcare workers to receive j&j coronavirus
vaccination in February.
Photo: gcS
COVID-19 vaccine acceptance
higher in poor countries
SAnjeetBAgcchi
People in low- and middle-income
countries (LMICs) appear more willing
to take a COVID-19 vaccine than those
living in richer countries such as Russia
and the US, according to a study
published in Nature Medicine.
An international team of researchers
from countries including the US, UK,
Germany, India, and Sierra Leone, say
the findings suggest that prioritising
vaccine distribution in poorer countries
would be an effective way to expand
global immunisation coverage.
Cases of COVID-19 are surging in
many parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin
America, as vaccination rates lag far
behind those in the global North. Many
African countries have not yet
vaccinated two per cent of their
populations, official figures show.
"Over 3.5 billion vaccines have been
distributed globally, but more than 75
per cent of those have gone to just ten
countries," WHO director-general
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the
World Trade Organization last week.
The study, which looked at 44,260
people, is based on surveys carried out
between June 2020 and January 2021,
in 10 LMICs in Africa, Asia, and South
America, as well as Russia and the US.
The average vaccine acceptance rate
in the LMICs was around 80 per cent,
compared to 65 per cent in the US and
30 per cent in Russia, the study found.
NiccoloMeriggi, study co-author and
country economist for the International
Growth Centre (IGC), Sierra Leone,
said: "We believe the study is
particularly important in informing the
global strategy for vaccine distribution.
If we want to maximise global coverage,
we should prioritise sending more
vaccines to low- and middle-income
countries where vaccine acceptance is
higher."
Personal protection against COVID-
19 infection was the most cited reason
for being willing to take a vaccine in
LMICs (91 per cent), as well as in the
US (94 per cent) and Russia (76 per
cent). In many countries, concern
about side effects was commonly cited
as a cause for vaccine reluctance.
Vaccination campaigns, say the
researchers, now need to focus on
translating stated vaccine acceptance
into actual uptake of vaccines.
When it comes to guidance on
immunisation, health workers are
counted as the most trusted sources,
according to the study. "Messages
highlighting vaccine efficacy and safety,
delivered by healthcare workers, could
be effective for addressing any
remaining hesitancy in the analysed
LMICs," it said.
Lawrence Gostin, professor of global
health law at Georgetown University in
the US and director of the World
Health Organization (WHO)
Collaborating Center on National and
Global Health Law, believes highincome
countries should immediately
donate large quantities of COVID-19
vaccines - not just excess vaccines - and
pledge vaccines for the future.
"We should stop trying to vaccinate
young healthy people or seek boosters
until health workers and the vulnerable
are fully vaccinated in LMICs," said
Gostin.In the US, 49.6 per cent of the
population is fully vaccinated, while in
Russia the figure is 13.7 per cent,
according to Our World in Data. Both
countries have seen the continued rise
of vocal anti-vaccination movements
during the pandemic.
Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the
Johns Hopkins Center for Health
Security, in the US, says the antivaccine
movement is much more
prevalent in high income countries
where "people have the luxury of not
seeing people dying from vaccinepreventable
illnesses".
"In developing countries, vaccines
literally mean life or death and people
see that on a day-to-day basis," said
Adalja, whose work focuses on
emerging infectious diseases.
A "Global Dashboard" on COVID-19
vaccine equity, developed jointly by the
WHO, the United Nations
Development Program and the
University of Oxford, estimates that if
low-income countries could keep up
the same COVID-19 vaccination rate as
high-income countries, they could add
$38 billion to their GDP forecast for
2021.
However, according to a WHO
statement: "richer countries are
projected to vaccinate quicker and
recover economically quicker from
COVID-19, while poorer countries
haven't even been able to vaccinate
their health workers and most at-risk
population and may not achieve pre-
COVID-19 levels of growth until 2024."
Lulu Bravo, professor emeritus of
pediatric infectious and tropical
diseases at the University of the
Philippines Manila, believes that
leaders from both rich and countries
can always find ways to encourage
people to accept the vaccines.
"The conditions prevailing in
different countries are never the same.
It may take more people working
together to educate and explain why
vaccination can save lives and end the
pandemic," she said.
FionA Broom
A UN summit which aims to tackle food
insecurity has become the scene of
controversy and disagreement, with
one group of scientists joining a parallel
event in protest.The United Nations
Food Systems Summit will begin three
days of "pre-summit" discussions
starting today (Monday), with the main
talks coming later on in September.
The summit, announced in 2019 by
the UN Secretary-General António
Guterres, says it aims to spur action
towards the Sustainable Development
Goals and drive collaboration to
transform the way the world produces,
consumes and thinks about food.
It follows a multi-agency UN report
earlier this month, which found that
millions more people from the world's
most vulnerable communities have
been pushed towards acute food
insecurity as a result of COVID-19,
existing conflicts and climate change.
The summit will involve UN agencies,
governments and non-government
organisations, while the advisory
committee includes members of major
food security and nutrition
organisations.
However, over 300 global civil society
organisations of small-scale food
producers, researchers and indigenous
communities will boycott the three-day
event, instead holding a tandem,
alternative pre-summit which started
yesterday (Sunday).
They say the UN event has been
"deeply compromised by a top-down
exclusion of many food systems actors
and an impoverished view of whose
food system knowledge matters".The
groups are concerned about the makeup
of a scientific panel which has been
instrumental in setting the agenda for
the UN summit.
The scientific group, chaired by
German economist Joachim von Braun,
has been established to ensure "the
robustness, breadth and independence
of the science that underpins the
summit and its outcomes", according to
the UN.
Yet in a briefing note on the
governance of food systems, the wellrespected
independent International
Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food
Systems (IPES-Food) said the group
was "imbalanced in its composition and
biased in its perspectives and sources of
knowledge" and said the selection
process for members was unclear.
The authors of the briefing note
include current and former members of
the High-Level Panel of Experts on
Food Security and Nutrition, the
science-policy interface of the UN
Committee on World Food Security
(CFS).
The CFS, an intergovernmental
platform, was established in 1974 and
reformed in 2009. It holds an annual
plenary session in Rome.Nine members
of the UN summit scientific group have
backgrounds in economics, which
IPES-Food says indicates a lack of
scientific diversity.
SciDev.Net requested details of how
many of the nearly 30 members of the
group were indigenous, from a youth or
producer organisation, civil society or
the private sector. Yet in a 1,200-word
emailed statement to SciDev.Net,
summit deputy to the Special Envoy
Martin Frick did not supply this
information, instead saying that
members were drawn from universities,
publicly funded research institutes,
multilateral bodies and regulators.
Frick said the scientific group was
appointed by the UN Secretary General
and it engaged with networks of
scientists and experts during the
preparatory process. "Scientists
worldwide continue to be invited to
A displaced South Sudanese woman cooking food at a refugee camp in Uganda.
submit research papers and findings to
the scientific group," he said.
The make-up of the science group is a
major issue, according to IPES-Food, as
"the scientific group leadership is
effectively the arbiter of what counts as
science for the Food Systems Summit".
Summit Special Envoy Agnes
Kalibata, president of the Alliance for a
Green Revolution in Africa, has said the
summit is seeking systemic
transformation of food systems. Science
has been flagged as a key pillar of this
food system transformation.
The food policy argument has centred
on the specific fields of science that are
being brought in to discussions.Food
systems are complex and sprawling,
and the range of views on how they
should be governed are as diverse as the
world's farming communities. Critics
say the summit is focused on
technology-driven agricultural
approaches and excludes key actors in
food systems, such as small-scale
farmers.
In a series of recommendations to the
summit organisers, Michael Fakhri, the
UN special rapporteur on the right to
food, argued that the summit was
dominated by 'sustainable intensive
agriculture' perspectives, at the cost of a
more ecological viewpoint.
"Sustainable intensive agriculture
recognises the importance of
responding to the social and ecological
dimensions of food production but does
so as part of an effort to reduce and
eliminate intensive agriculture's
harmful effects," says Fakhri. "Whereas
agroecology is a practice committed to
avoiding harmful effects all together."
A petition, signed by more than 150
scientists who support the approach of
agroecology, where ecological concepts
are combined with farming techniques,
calls on researchers to boycott the
summit.
Photo: Bertha Wangari