If we want to shift towards healthy and sustainable food systems and build back better after the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to re-connect agriculture with ecosystem services and unleash biodiversity’s full potential to enhance our food and agriculture production, the participants of a high-level panel discussion, co-organised by the Food and Agriculture Organisation, FAO and the European Union, heard recently.
The virtual discussion entitled “The European Green Deal : A Conversation on the Transformative Force of the EU and Biodiversity Strategies to build Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems” focused on ways to strengthen the FAO-EU collaboration on addressing challenges to sustainably manage biodiversity across all agricultural sectors.
“Biodiversity is vital to improving agricultural and food production and maintaining our planet’s resources and ecosystems,” said FAO Director-General QU Dongyu, calling for more to be done to prevent the biodiversity loss undermining the resilience of many agricultural systems and posing a serious threat to global food security.
However, in his opening remarks Qu noted that achieving sustainability at a global scale requires more than just technical and digital solutions. “It involves key policy decisions, and in this regard the EU just made a big step,” the FAO Director-General said referring to the recently adopted European Green Deal.
To this end, he noted that the implementation of these important decisions in the field requires strong collaborative efforts between environment and agriculture sectors.
“We are ready to work together with the environment sector; to accompany the changes across the entire food system, from production to consumption,” Qu concluded.