Navigating the policy puzzle of incoherency and conflicting outcomes

Early September witnessed a flurry of significant events that underscored the urgency of addressing sustainability challenges within Africa’s food systems. The Africa Climate Summit and Africa Climate Week, alongside the Africa Food Systems Forum, highlighted the crucial need for a sustainable and nature-positive transformation in food production.

Africa’s food systems are grappling with interconnected productivity and sustainability challenges. Efforts to make them more efficient and resilient require a difficult conversation to identify tensions between different outcomes. It also requires enabling societal debate and political bargaining on overcoming complex conflicts and trade-offs, such as inadvertently harming long-term soil health for agricultural production.

Steering such a conversation to build coherency of thought and action requires, above all, political engagement and sound public, private and civic partnerships. The simultaneous occurrence of these events not only underlines the shared pathways to food systems transformation but also points to a disconnect with the governance mechanisms that drive the system, resulting in competing outcomes…

Read the full article at Farming First