NEW YORK, AUGUST 20 – The United Nations have announced that te UN Food Systems Summit will take place as a virtual event on September 23 during the UN General Assembly in New York.
The Summit will follow the three-day Pre-Summit gathering in Rome (July 26-28), during which Amina J. Mohammed, UN Deputy Secretary-General, outlined the expectations for the Summit, which include:
- A statement of action from the UN Secretary-General
- A compendium of the Summit’s two-year preparations
- National dialogues and pathways for food systems to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030
- Coalitions cutting across the five Action Tracks and incorporating the four Levers of Change around key areas
- A follow-up and review process supported by the UN and its agencies.
The UN Food Systems Summit was announced by the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, on World Food Day last October as a part of the Decade of Action for delivery on the SDGs by 2030. The aim of the Summit is to deliver progress on all 17 of the SDGs through a food systems approach, leveraging the interconnectedness of food systems to global challenges such as hunger, climate change, poverty and inequality.
Last week the United States requested that the United Nations scale back the annual General Assembly meeting in New York next month, making it a mostly virtual gathering, to avoid the “superspreader” infection risks posed by the pandemic’s highly contagious Delta variant.
The request, made in a diplomatic note sent by the U.S. Mission to the other members of the global organization, appeared to assure that the world’s biggest diplomatic gathering would be similar to the mostly virtual one held in 2020, or perhaps be even more restricted. (@OnuItalia)
