A new report launched at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2023 in Davos on Monday showed how “early mover” countries can accelerate the food systems transformation.
The report, Food, Nature and Health Transitions – Repeatable Country Models, offers insights into the actions and investments that can accelerate a country’s transition towards food systems that deliver a stronger economy, better livelihoods for a more inclusive set of people, greater nutritional security and improved health, while causing a lower impact on the climate and nature.
“Transforming food systems provide healthy and nutritious diets and dignified jobs for farmers and producers. This report shows how economic development with environment protection supports communities in climate adaption and mitigation efforts,” said Gim Huay Neo, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum’s Centre for Nature and Climate.
The report, written in collaboration with Bain & Company, presents “repeatable models” from seven “early mover” countries in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe whose performance has been comparatively strong and whose examples and lessons are widely relevant.
Their stories of transformation identify common, repeatable elements, including the most critical actions and investments for driving change and how they should be coordinated.
“Depending on the country context, different pathways could be adopted to transform our agrifood systems for improved food security and nutrition and assuring sustainability,” said Maximo Torero Cullen, Chief Economist at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
“Scaling up climate resilience and strengthening our food environment to promote healthy diets are two key interventions with positive impacts on food security, nature and health.
“When food fails, everything fails,” added Geraldine Matchett, Co-Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer of Royal DSM, and Co-Chair of the CEO Alliance on Food, Nature and Health. “We must work to transform our food systems to be resilient, sustainable and healthy.”
A number of countries, including Ghana, India and Vietnam, have been able to evolve their food systems to improve a broader set of outcomes by unlocking the potential of small and medium-sized enterprises, particularly those that are farmer-allied and operating in local food chains.
Countries can also use innovation to improve productivity, sustainability and nutritional outcomes, as demonstrated in Algeria, which has improved food security in the face of significant constraints on water availability, while Vietnam has sustainably intensified its rice production.
Farmers are more likely to adopt new practices if the economics work in their favour, according to the report, but making this happen requires action from many stakeholders.
Examples in Canada and New Zealand illustrate how to scale adoption of nature-positive and climate-smart food production, particularly focusing on the case for an economic advantage for producers.
Each of the “early mover” country profiles in the report show how multiple actors and concurrent levers, across sectors, interact and coordinate to enable large-scale transformation over time. Collectively, they demonstrate the potential for these levers — if applied in tandem and with greater urgency — to accelerate country-led food systems transformation.
INTERNATIONAL AND PANEL
Report Claims China’s Covid Casualty Data Underestimates True Death Toll
The nearly 60,000 Covid-related deaths China reported for the first five weeks of its current outbreak, the largest the world has ever seen, may underestimate the true toll by hundreds of thousands of fatalities, experts were quoted as saying in a media report.
China’s abrupt pivot from Covid Zero in early December (2022) unleashed a surge of omicron infections and led to 59,938 virus-related deaths in the nation’s hospitals through January 12, Bloomberg news agency reported, citing the figures disclosed by the National Health Commission.
While the number swamps the few dozen deaths previously recorded in the official tally – which drew widespread criticism both at home and abroad, including from the World Health Organization (WHO) – experts say it’s still likely to be an underestimate given the enormous scale of the outbreak and the mortality rates seen at the height of omicron waves in other countries that initially pursued a Covid Zero strategy, the news agency reported.
“This reported number of Covid-19 deaths might be the tip of the iceberg,” Zuo-Feng Zhang, chair of the department of epidemiology at the Fielding School of Public Health at University of California, Los Angeles was quoted by the news agency as saying.
While the figure is roughly in line with what Zhang estimated might be coming from the country’s hospitals, he said it’s only a fraction of the total Covid deaths across the country.
Using a report from the National School of Development at Peking University that found 64 per cent of the population was infected by mid-January, he estimated 900,000 people would have died in the previous five weeks based on a conservative 0.1 per cent case fatality rate. That means the official hospital death count is less than 7 per cent of the total mortality seen during the outbreak, the news agency reported.
The official toll translates to 1.17 deaths daily for every million people in the country over the course of five weeks, according to a Bloomberg analysis. That’s well below the average daily mortality rate seen in other countries that initially pursued Covid Zero or managed to contain the virus after relaxing their pandemic rules.
When omicron hit South Korea, daily deaths quickly climbed to nearly seven for every 1 million people. Australia and New Zealand saw mortality nearing or topping four per million a day during their first winters with omicron. Even Singapore, which had a well-planned and gradual shift away from its zero tolerance approach, had deaths peak at about two per million people daily.
“These figures would suggest that China is having a very mild wave, with very few deaths per case,” Louise Blair, head of vaccines and epidemiology at the London-based predictive health analytics firm Airfinity, was quoted by the news agency as saying. “It would be the lowest of any country/region abandoning a zero Covid policy.”
It could be that many of the country’s deaths occurred in nursing care facilities or at home, explaining some of the undercount, Blair said, as China’s latest disclosure only counted hospital deaths. Reports of overwhelmed crematoriums around the country suggest excess mortality is at a high level.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recently spoke with Ma Xiaowei, the director of China’s National Health Commission, about the Covid-19 situation in the country. “WHO appreciates this meeting, as well as the public release of information on the overall situation,” the United Nations’ health agency said in a statement.
Chinese officials have provided information to the WHO on a range of topics, including outpatient clinics, hospitalisations, patients requiring emergency treatment and critical care, and hospital deaths related to Covid-19 infection.
The WHO is currently analysing the information, which covers early December 2022 to January 12, 2023, and allows for a “better understanding of the epidemiological situation and the impact of this wave in China”.
Comment here