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AMIS Secretariat
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
Viale delle Terme di Caracalla
00153 Rome, Italy

Tel: (+39) 06 570 53539
Fax: (+39) 06 570 53152
Email: [email protected]

Building on the momentum of the Food Systems Summit

29 Jul 2021

With the outbreak of COVID-19, food systems have been exposed to an unprecedented external shock as the pandemic has impacted different segments of the global value chain. Overall, the agriculture sector has demonstrated its resilience to provide sufficient, safe, and nutritious food. Notwithstanding, there is a risk of an additional 100 million people being undernourished due to this health crisis.

Sustainable Development Goal 2c calls on governments to adopt measures to ensure the proper functioning of food commodity markets and to facilitate timely access to market information, including food reserves, in order to help limit extreme food price volatility. AMIS has contributed to this global objective, yet we need to increase our efforts to continue improving our data collection, transparency, and analysis.

A unique characteristic of AMIS is that it brings together the expertise of policymakers and senior officials from participating countries as well as several international organizations to assess and analyze market conditions and coordinate early discussions about possible policy responses. Preventing instability in agricultural markets will require an open and transparent collaboration and the sharing of good practices and experiences in building effective market information systems. This collaboration will be particularly important in view of the challenges posed by the economic recovery after COVID-19.

The 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit provides a forum for an informed policy dialog that will hopefully lead to globally agreed recommendations to promote well-functioning agricultural markets. AMIS will closely align its future work programme to any relevant provisions coming out of the Summit and embrace new partnerships for supporting the emerging challenges in agri-food systems.