IRRI Regional Representative for South Asia Dr. Nafees Meah is the guest editor for the ” Food Systems Transformation” issue no. 147, 2021 of the Geography and You (G’nY) Magazine . The following is an overview of the issue as written by Dr. Meah.
Food systems are at the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development because they engage food security and human nutrition, ecosystem services, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and rural prosperity. However, the current food system in South Asia is dysfunctional and what is needed is its transformation to deliver benefits for people and the planet. The challenge now is to articulate in concrete terms how this is to be achieved in South Asia?
This week, the United Nations is convening a Food System Summit (FSS) in New York. This Summit aims to “serve as a historic opportunity to empower all people to leverage the power of food systems to drive our recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and get us back on track to achieve all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030”. As an input to this global exercise, I was very pleased to help bring together some of the leading experts working on food system transformation in South Asia to share their perspectives and add to the debate in this special issue of the popular journo-magazine ‘Geography and You’ on Transforming South Asia’s Food Systems, that I had the privilege of guest-editing.
Among our contributors, we were delighted to have Pawan Agarwal and Prof. Saleemul Huq, who are both co-chairs of individual Action Tracks in the UN FSS, and Prof. Ramesh Chand who is…