The UN Food Systems Summit's biggest challenge? Accountability.

Ensuring accountability for commitments made at the United Nations Food Systems Summit will be the event’s steepest challenge, according to representatives from across the food system.

The lead-up to the UNFSS, announced by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres in 2019, has brought together people who work in diverse aspects of the food system for a series of dialogues to imagine how to remake the way the world produces, transports, accesses, and eats nutritious food while protecting the planet. The event is set to take place in September in New York, with a pre-summit happening this month in Rome.

The 2021 State of Food Security in the World report, released this week, found that food systems transformation is increasingly urgent as predictions of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on food security were realized: Nearly 12% of the global population was severely food insecure in 2020, with around 118 million more people facing hunger last year than in 2019.

At a two-day event ahead of this month's pre-summit, Devex convened U.N. representatives, farmers, researchers, chefs, sustainability advocates, and others to share their visions for the summit process — and, most importantly, how summit participants can push for accountability mechanisms to ensure meaningful change is not only conceived but achieved.

Dr. David Nabarro, whose organization 4SD has led the summit dialogue process, said the stakes couldn’t be higher for food systems reform.

“As we look ahead and consider our legacy and the world that we will be leaving, we have to really focus on the big issues that are still not properly resolved,” Nabarro said. “If we get food right, then the [Sustainable Development Goals] will be achieved. If we get food wrong, then actually it’s going to be very hard indeed to have the world that we need and want for the future.”

The lofty agenda posed by the UNFSS is split into five “action tracks,” each led by an expert in different areas of the food system. They are ensuring access to safe and nutritious food for all; shifting to sustainable consumption patterns; boosting nature-positive production; advancing equitable livelihoods; and building resilience to vulnerabilities, shocks, and stress.

Several action track leads said the process has brought them together in conversation with people from different fields with whom they’ve never previously interacted.

“I had to have my arm twisted to get into this because I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting into. But I was persuaded that resilience, the track I was asked to do, was about food systems resilience to climate. And so there’s a lot of commonality,” said Action Track 5 Chair Saleemul Huq, and director at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development.

“One of the great pleasures of my working on this Food Systems Summit has been meeting a lot of people that I didn't know before, quite frankly, working on different aspects of the food system. And I think the biggest learning for me was thinking about the complexity and learning about the complexity of the food system,” he said.

Last month, the UNFSS secretariat released a list of more than 50 “solutions clusters” selected from the feedback collected from the summit’s dialogue process. Action Tracks were responsible for hosting a range of dialogues to generate ideas for food systems transformation, while anyone could host an “independent dialogue.”

But the summit’s mandate doesn’t include any built-in accountability mechanisms to carry out solutions, which could hamper the overall effectiveness of the process, said Meera Shekar, global lead for nutrition at World Bank. She said some of the ideas proposed so far are “not smart commitments” with clear goalposts for measurement.

“The urgency is absolutely clear. After the summit we need action. We need to have agreed upon, implementable actions, and linked to that is the accountability piece. If we leave everything as voluntary, nothing will change,” Shekar said. “Having some systems in place that will inspect or track what we promise — I think that is absolutely critical.”

She said that accountability mechanisms that have been identified in advance of the Nutrition for Growth Summit in December provide a model for how the UNFSS could structure outcomes to make them actionable and trackable.

Questions were also raised about UNFSS governance, amid concerns from civil society groups that “corporate capture” has dominated a process that was meant to be led by the people. The People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty is working to organize a counter-event called the Global People’s Summit on Food Systems.

“We feel that the U.N. Food Systems [Summit] was not inclusive and it was not fair and the consultations were not enough — that our views were not captured,” said Hakim Baliraine, Africa representative to the executive committee of the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty. “That’s why we thought that we had to come up with another way … by introducing the Global People’s Summit.”

Multiple representatives from the UNFSS secretariat were invited to share their views at Devex’s event, but they declined to participate.

Some in civil society have also protested the fact that the summit process is organized outside the U.N. Committee on World Food Security, or CFS, a body they say already exists to achieve the goals set out by the UNFSS.

CFS Secretary Chris Hegadorn said he hopes the body is strengthened through the summit process but that ultimately, as it is currently structured, the secretary-general is accountable for summit outcomes. He said governments have not been asked to negotiate or agree to anything through CFS and that “there are as many views and opinions as there are people involved” on how the summit should be governed and organized.

“If governments are not delivering — and we’ve seen the results of governments not delivering with 811 million people undernourished, 3 billion people who can’t afford a healthy diet — there’s got to be something more done,” Hegadorn said.