On October 21, 2013, the 2020 and Strategic Advisory Council met to discuss the 2020 consultation theme and key issues to include in the conference program. The council was enthusiastic about the consultation’s relevance, timeliness, and potential for informing policy and program investments and actions for resilience.
Several key messages emerged during the Advisory Council’s discussion:
- The conference presents the opportunity to identify key knowledge and action gaps on resilience for food and nutrition security and can thus contribute to scaling up investment in a long-term research program to improve the evidence base and build better data systems.
- The definition of resilience should be more ambitious and include helping people achieve a better quality of life than before a shock, and not just help them “bounce back” to where they were before the shock occurred.
- Building resilience should include actions to prevent shocks, not only actions to prepare people, communities, and countries for shocks. The conference should address the temporal aspects of resilience: how to deal with short-term issues while preparing for the long term.
- The private sector’s role in building resilience for food and nutrition security should be more prominent in the conference program.
- More attention should be paid to policy options and to policy coherence for building resilience.
The Council will meet again in early 2014 to discuss the progression of the policy consultation and preparation for the conference.
