United Nations Food System Summit: Pathways to Attain Sustainable Access to Safe and Nutritious Foods for All in Sierra Leone.

Introduction

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. The Summit has been convened in recognition of the significance and complexity of food systems around the world and offers an opportunity for countries to identify pathways towards sustainable national food systems that will contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Sierra Leone viewed the invitation of the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations to participate in the global Food Systems Summit as a golden opportunity to reflect and identify bottlenecks in our current food system and how we can create a pathway to enhance a sustainable food system in reaching the SGD targets by 2030. Establishing a pathway through a multi-sectoral approach for nutrition-sensitive and sustainable food systems in Sierra Leone required creating an inclusive dialogue process for awareness-raising and elevating public discourse, and reshaping national commitments based on those dialogues to accelerate progress in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Country food systems context

Sierra Leone has been categorized as a fragile state with chronic food insecurity because of periodic disruption in our food systems because of natural disasters, disease outbreaks and socioeconomic factors. Furthermore, our food systems are not resilient due to the increasing level of the vulnerable population with high-level food insecurity over the past 15 years as revealed by the Comprehensive Food Security Vulnerability Analysis reports in 2010 (45%), 2015 (50%) and 2020 (57%). All these factors contribute to the high malnutrition rate among children under the age of five years. Agriculture, forestry, and fishing still account for the largest share of GDP at 61.29 % in 2020, according to the World Bank development indicators. The agriculture sector is also the largest employer and accounts for over 70% of the current labour force. Most of the population of Sierra Leone lives in rural areas, trapped in a combination of low agricultural productivity and malnutrition, with approximately 70% living below the national poverty line, with 26% unable to meet the minimum consumption of 2,400 kilocalories required per day (GoSL, 2013). This suggests that Sierra Leone’s economy can only be sustainably transformed, and its levels of poverty significantly stemmed if the food systems productivity are duly scaled up. One of the greatest challenges in our food system is to ensure that all people have access to sufficient and quality food to ensure food and nutrition security. The agriculture and fisheries systems are the main drivers to address this challenge. Our agricultural and fishery system is not producing adequate food and people are not earning enough to access enough nutritious and safe food that is affordable in all food economy zones. This suggests that Sierra Leone’s economy can only be sustainably transformed, and its levels of poverty significantly stemmed if the food systems productivity are duly scaled up.