On 6 March 2019, the Secretary-General will chair the Annual Meeting of the Members of the OECD Council and Partners on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The meeting brought together over 65 governments from the OECD and its Partner countries, as well as international organizations, to share national experiences in the implementation of the SDGs.
Ministers and senior officials will lead discussions on the themes chosen for this year’s meeting: Addressing inequalities by empowering those left behind: promoting gender mainstreaming and skills and education policies that are fit for 2030; Achieving environmental objectives, including for interim 2020 targets; Mobilising more impactful and effective financing for the SDGs
This meeting complements and contributes to key United Nations processes on the SDGs, including preparations for the High-Level Political Forum to be held in New York in July and September 2019.
One of the most important and systemic policy option offered in the Report is to link the productivity gains with the protection of the ecosystems. It also represents a new investment opportunity. Governments, financial sector, and the private sector, more broadly, should pursue such linkages and make them as explicit as possible through a variety of mechanisms such as international finance, supply chains commitments (corporate responsibility), agricultural loans and etc. There is a need to form the set of market signals that sustainable food production is affordable and has a wide societal and commercial value.
Agriculture already uses almost half of the world’s vegetated land, and agriculture and related land-use change generate one-quarter of annual GHG emissions. According to authors of the Report, the goal related to reducing ecosystem stress from agricultural expansion is to change the land management, shift to the use of lands with relatively low environmental (and other) opportunity costs but with good productive potential, facilitate expansion only where it would cause less environmental harm. This shift has to be facilitated by the national governments with possible cooperation with international aid agencies and the private sector, improve the tools for screening the lands across the countries worldwide.
The important role in overall improving food systems is given to the communities and community-based comanagement of the livestock, particularly, in the management of wild fish stocks. Again, governments play an important role in eliminating harmful fisheries subsidies, that contribute to the overfishing and depletion of natural resources.
Feeding sustainably 10 billion people by 2050 is possible, but requires significant policy, technological innovation and investment by public and private sector and partnerships.
