2025, a pivotal year for Africa’s agricultural transformation
2025 begins with the African Union adopting the Kampala Declaration and the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), a ten-year landmark strategy to build strong resilient agrifood systems that drive agricultural growth, transformation, and improved livelihoods across the continent. The African Union acknowledges that Africa’s food security remains a pressing challenge, exacerbated by climate change, conflicts, rapid population growth, and economic disruptions. The CAADP Strategy and Action Plan seeks to address these issues by equipping Africa to feed itself sustainably. (News #1)
According to News #2, the results of its predecessor, the Malabo Declaration (2020-2025), have been mixed, with the continent remaining overall off-track to meet the ambitious targets. On some sub-goals, such as enhancing investment finance in agriculture, all countries are off-track. For others, like increasing fertiliser use to the goal of 50kg of nutrients per ha to boost productivity, only four countries – Ethiopia, Egypt, Malawi, and Morocco – are on track.
Unlike the previous framework for African agricultural development that was solely focusing on agricultural production, the Kampala Declaration promotes a broader agri-food systems approach, considers the entire food value chain, and puts at the centre nutrition, sustainability, and resilience. (News #3 & #4)
Tracking progress in food system transformation
The 2024 Food System Countdown report tracks progress on the global food system transformation by providing updated data on 50 food system indicators. The results of the analysis offer reasons for optimism: of the 42 indicators with time trends examined, 20 have changed in a desirable direction, on average, globally. For example, access to safe water – essential for food security and for keeping food safe – has increased significantly across all regions, and most regions’ production systems have become more efficient at using nitrogen, meaning less is wasted as run-off that pollutes the environment. However, some indicators (7 of 42) have significantly worsened globally over the period 2000-2022. For example, food price volatility has increased, suggesting less stable prices amid food system shocks, and government accountability has decreased, indicating that governance may not be rising to the challenge of supporting food systems transformation. For 15 indicators, there has been no significant change despite the need for steady progress to meet key global goals. The report also examines the interactions within and across the 50 Countdown indicators. Interactions are critical because change (or lack thereof) in one indicator can cause (or block) changes in others, leading to trade-offs between goals as well as unintended consequences of actions. (Publication #1)
The recently launched EU Food System Dashboard developed by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) monitors the sustainability of the EU food system from an environmental, economic and social perspective, based on a set of indicators. It aims to give a comprehensive and cross-sectoral overview of the food supply chain. This includes all the chain’s components – primary production, food processing, distribution and consumption – and different sustainability aspects such as: (i) climate; (ii) pollution; (iii) biodiversity; (iv) economic viability of business; and (v) food environment. (Online resource #2)
Gender equality and food systems
The latest SOFA 2024 edition acknowledges gender inequalities as one of the drivers of hidden social costs. The report shows that closing the productivity gap between male and female-managed farms could lead to a surge in agricultural value added and an increase of the GDP of up to 1.47%, as well as reductions in food insecurity of up to 2.88% in traditional systems. (Publication #3).
Recent years have seen a growing recognition of the interdependency between gender and food systems transformation agendas. This momentum has been recently accelerated by the Committee on World Food Security’s publication of Voluntary Guidelines on Gender Equality and Women’s and Girls’ Empowerment in the Context of Food Security and Nutrition. (Publication #4) The EU third Gender Action Plan 2021-2025 (GAP III) makes gender equality and women’s and girls’ empowerment a cross-cutting priority of EU external action.
Recognizing the critical role women play in all segments of food systems, and the importance of achieving gender equality as an integrative part of food systems transformation, the EC Knowledge Centre for Global Food and Nutrition Security (KC-FNS) announces the new priority topic on “Gender equality and Food Systems”. Readers are invited to explore the six sections: 1) Brief me, 2) Publications, 3) Policies, 4) Initiatives and Programmes 5) Online resources – documents, datasets and main existing fora/ community of practices, 6) News and events.
The Knowledge Review on the same topic published by the KC-FNS gathers findings from recent literature on how gender equality, women’s empowerment and food systems transformation interact, identifying synergies and trade-offs. (Publication #5).
The Knowledge Review highlights key challenges in policies and programming for the integration of gender equality in food systems. It finds that efforts to integrate gender empowerment in food systems have mainly been developed locally, rather than at the institutional level in food systems, and that the conceptualisation of food systems reminds largely gender blind. Considering women and men as homogenous group and neglecting other social inequalities is a further frequent shortcoming. Evidence confirms that women’s empowerment can improve nutrition and food security, but complementary measures (such as social protection, childcare, legal frameworks, infrastructures) are needed to ensure positive trade-offs between gender equality and other food systems outcomes.
The Knowledge Review features recommendations for actions regarding Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in food systems, in particular the adoption of Gender Transformative Approaches to go beyond conventional gender mainstreaming and target the underlying causes of gender inequality, in line with the EU Gender Action Plan (GAP III). (Publications #6, #7 & #9)
Financing flows, food crises and USAID’s freeze
The latest edition of the Financing Flows and Food Crises report shows an overall decrease of humanitarian assistance of 19% compared to 2022. This decline was even more significant for allocations to food sectors in food crises, which went down by 30%. Despite the decrease between 2022 and 2023, the long-term trend of humanitarian assistance remains positive (up by 56 percent since 2016). (Publication #10)
U.S. Government’s 90-day freeze on foreign aid, along with all USAID direct hire personnel being placed on administrative leave globally, places the future of US foreign aid programs under great uncertainty, puts at risk the positive impact obtained by working with communities in vulnerable areas worldwide and is an immediate life threat to populations in food crisis depending on external food and health assistance for survival. (News #5 & #6)
News #7 reports that USAID is the world’s largest single donor, providing 42% of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations in 2024.
