The COVID-19 pandemic, among many other issues, has severely disrupted global food value chains and hampered access to safe and quality food, and has made it increasingly difficult for states to meet their 2030 Agenda commitments, especially the second Sustainable Development Goal (SDG): End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture. To draw attention to this problem, within the framework of the Decade of Action to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, at the initiative of the UN FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in conjunction with the High-Level Week of the 76th Session of the UN General Assembly, convenes a Summit on Food Systems in 2021.
The Summit will launch new actions aimed at achieving progress on all 17 SDGs, each of which depends to some extent on healthier, more sustainable and fairly functioning food systems. The summit is designed to draw attention to the fact that we all must work to change the world models of food production and consumption and the attitude towards them. It will be a “solutions summit” that will require new action to improve the world's food systems.
As a contribution to the work of the Summit and for the active involvement of all countries of the world in the preparation for the Food Systems Summit, the UN member states are recommended to initiate dialogues on food systems in the period from November 2020 to May 2021.
In this regard, food systems dialogues are being convened in three formats. The main format is national dialogues; the second one is global dialogues that are fueled by the results of national dialogues; the third one is independent dialogues that can be convened within states, between states and representatives of interest groups and parties, consumers, producers, academia, and public organizations.
The UN Global Compact Local Network (the UN Global Compact Network Russia) has joined the dialogues ahead of the 2021 Food Systems Summit. Participants of the UN Global Compact Network Russia, who had assumed responsibility for contributing to the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, confirmed their awareness of responsible business operating in all sectors of the economy as directly affecting the formation of effective and sustainable food systems.
In this regard, the UNGC Local Network considers it necessary to develop and disseminate the principles and standards that are common across all business sectors, contributing to shaping of sustainable food systems. The formulation and dissemination of such standards will enable responsible companies, including those not currently associating their responsibilities with the problems of global hunger and food, better understand the boundaries and extent of their positive and negative impacts in this area, and synchronize corporate strategies with tasks of solving problems and introducing new tools for the development and strengthening of food systems.
These standards can be presented to the market in the form of Guidelines or a Code of Sustainable Food Systems Promotion. The Guidelines (the Code) should be developed taking into account the UNGC principles on human rights and labor relations, environment and anti-corruption, as well as the principles of responsible investment and financing, the principles of taking into account the interests of all stakeholders and supporting ambitions to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The UNGC Local Network’s participants, in particular, the Interstate Development Corporation, FosAgro PJSC, X5 GROUP, SAP, the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North and others, have suggested within the dialogues that their best practices, business experience in the area of production and business patterns, sales and retail, green sustainable financing and investment, digital technologies and artificial intelligence, promotion of, informing on and formation of sustainable development values, partnerships, cooperation, and etc. should be taken into account when forming the national strategy.
The UNGC Local Network have marked itself ready to take responsibility for facilitating the further progress of the Russian community in these matters, including by forming an expert group of stakeholders (business, NGOs, business associations, academic segment) to work together, taking into account the decisions and proposals of the Summit, and by developing a catalog of measures (tools) that can be considered or scaled up by different stakeholders.