Nicholas Nisbett and Jody Harris have been appointed to a new Committee on World Food Security (CFS) High Level Panel of Experts project team to work on an upcoming report on “Reducing inequalities for food security and nutrition”, which will be presented to the CFS in October 2023.
The main criteria for choosing the team included the general principles of scientific and technical relevance as well as regional expertise, resulting in an extraordinary interdisciplinary team, well-equipped to address the multidimensional and intersectional aspects of inequality and vulnerability.
International food security and nutrition experts
Nicholas Nisbett is a Senior Research Fellow at IDS, where he co-leads the Health and Nutrition Cluster of researchers and has a wealth of expertise on development and nutrition. Jody Harris is a Research Fellow at IDS specialising in the politics and ethics of food systems and nutrition policy. Both also teach on our MA Food and Development course and are co-convenors of the IDS Food Equity Centre.
The selected international experts cover different areas of knowledge, including sociology, political economy, economics, statistical analysis, legal aspects of inequalities and human rights, gender analysis, rural and urban development, and, naturally, food systems, health and nutrition.
Serving in their personal capacities, they will engage with the HLPE-FSN Steering Committee. In addition, selected experts will be co-authors of the future HLPE-FSN flagship report and will participate in the CFS public debate on inequalities and food security and nutrition as part of the HLPE-FSN.
They will be responsible for assessing the science related to inequality and world food security and nutrition and will consider all the contributions received during the consultative processes, in a transparent and inclusive way, open to all forms of knowledge from many actors – knowledge of local implementation, knowledge based on global research and knowledge of “best practice” – that draw on both local and global sources.
The selected experts
The high-level multidisciplinary team is led by Bhavani Shankar, who will coordinate the work of eight other members:
Jane Battersby
Shiferaw Bekele
Jody Harris
Christina Hicks
Mariaelena Huambachano
Swetha Manohar
Nicholas Nisbett
Melissa Shapiro
The report
The report, which will provide recommendations to the CFS workstream on inequalities, will:
- Analyse quantitative and qualitative evidence relating to how inequalities in access to assets (particularly land, other natural resources and finance), and incomes within the agri-food systems impede opportunities for many actors to overcome food insecurity and malnutrition.
- Relevant data on asset endowments in rural communities will be useful along with the findings of latest The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) reports. Given the focus on agri-food systems and the key role of family farmers within these systems, linkages and complementarities with the UN Decade of Family Farming will be examined, including as reference to decent employment issues in the agri-food sector.
- Analyse the drivers of inequalities and provide recommendations on entry points to address these.
- Identify areas requiring further research and data collection, also in view of the opportunities provided by the ongoing joint effort of the World Bank, FAO and IFAD within the 50 x 2030 Initiative to close the agricultural data gap.
The proposed thematic workstream on inequalities will contribute to the CFS vision and the overall objective of addressing the root causes of food insecurity with a focus on the people most affected by hunger and malnutrition.
The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) was established in 1974 and reformed in 2009 as the foremost inclusive international and intergovernmental platform for all stakeholders to work together to ensure food security and nutrition for all.
