H.E Deputy Prime Minister Pham Binh Minh opening the 2nd National Dialogue on Vietnam Food System
“The world is still combating hunger and malnutrition, while the global food chains are disrupted. In Vietnam, multiple challenges, especially low competitiveness of small-farm holders and the impacts of climate change are imposing an overriding need to transform the food systems towards higher value and sustainability,” H.E Deputy Prime Minister Pham Binh Minh said at the 2nd National Dialogue on Vietnam Food Systems to 2030 held in Hanoi on 16 July. He stressed the importance of the dialogue series in the current circumstances.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the United Nations in Vietnam jointly organized the 2nd National Dialogue of the Vietnam Food Systems. This event summarized the key outcomes of the Food System Dialogue series including the 1st National Dialogue and three Sub Regional Dialogues in preparation for the UN Food Systems Summit.
About 190 participants (in-person and online) joined the discussions on priorities and helped shape pathways for national food systems to be sustainable by 2030. The dialogue reported some of the most important challenges, vulnerabilities, and gaps affecting Vietnam’s food systems in four dimensions: Access to safe and nutritious food, Sustainable food production, Food value chains, and Cross-cutting issues.
Participants proposed game-changing solutions for Vietnam to develop responsible, sustainable, and transparent food systems by 2030 with the commitment of multiple stakeholders: national partners, international research and development institutions, private sector, multilateral and bilateral donors, industry associations, and civil society groups.
Dr. Jean Balié shared OneCGIAR’s commitments to support food systems in Southeast Asia through regional integration of initiatives in three potential areas: recovering, resilience, and transformation. He highlighted One CGIAR’s initiative to secure the agri-food systems in the Asian Pacific Mega-Deltas against sea-level rise, flooding, and salinization, which is led by Dr. Bjoern Ole Sander of IRRI and Dr. Shakuntala Thilsted of WorldFish. By strengthening relationships with country partners, One CGIAR will deliver bottom-up and demand-driven innovations to help address the main barriers and promote systemic change in food systems.
Concluding the Food Systems Dialogue series, Minister of Agriculture Dr. Le Minh Hoan drew attention to the key actions forward, including the development of an agricultural economy, digital transformation in parallel with green transformation, developing a system for alerting natural disaster risks and epidemics in agriculture, and building low-emission food systems. As a result of this dialogue series, a national report will be compiled and presented at the UN Food Systems Summit in September 2021.
