Lawrence Hadad, the 2018 World Food Prize Laureate and Executive Director of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), shares his insights on the critical importance of a food systems approach to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). During his visit to Ethiopia, Dr. Hadad discusses the challenges and opportunities within the country’s food systems, emphasizing the need for collaboration among diverse stakeholders. With a focus on data, policy coherence, and the inclusion of marginalized groups, he outlines actionable steps for transforming Ethiopia’s food landscape to ensure access to nutritious diets for all. This interview captures key excerpts from his discussion, highlighting his vision for a more resilient and equitable food system in Ethiopia.
Capital: In your view, why is a food systems approach crucial for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?
Lawrence Haddad: If you think about food, how we produce it, how we process it, how we eat it, how we dispose of it, all of those decisions affect the environment, they affect jobs, they affect climate, they affect our health, they just affect lots of different things. And if you only look at agriculture, and not the whole food system, you miss a big part of the story. So it’s really important to look from farm all the way to fork.
From looking to farm to fork, we have the opportunity to move nutrition, climate, jobs, environment, resilience, all of those things at the same time.
Capital: What are the key objectives of the Ethiopian Food Systems (EFS) process, and how does it aim to transform the national food systems?
Lawrence Haddad: So I think the goals of the Ethiopian food system transformation process are pretty similar to the ones I mentioned earlier. Increased access to healthy foods better resilience to climate and all kinds of shocks, better jobs, safer food. These are the kinds of objectives that the government has said is a priority.
Make different decisions about what to grow and maybe where to grow it. There’s a big agenda around local production. So let’s try and do more local production. The more diverse, if we produce foods in lots of different places, it means that no one place is vulnerable to a shock.
So it may mean we grow different foods, maybe more on legumes and pulses, maybe more on vegetables. But it may mean we grow food more locally. It may mean that we focus on foods that are maybe more nutritious. It may mean that we focus on how much emissions our food is producing or how many jobs food is produced and so it helps us make decisions about food that are not just good for one thing but good for lots of things.
Capital: With over 120 stakeholders involved in the EFS dialogues, what strategies have been most effective in fostering collaboration among diverse groups?
Lawrence Haddad: Dialogue is always the best thing to do, is to get people in a room and not always the people that we always meet. So, let’s get to talk to people we don’t normally meet, but more importantly not just talk but listen. We have to understand people’s concerns.
If one group of people is worried about climate emissions from animal production, Another group of people is worried about “‘animal production is my livelihood. It’s my culture.” So how do we get those two people in a room to talk about the trade-offs, to acknowledge the different perspectives and then critically to come up with a solution that works for both? So dialogue is really key, but dialogue is not just about talking, but also about listening.
Capital: What are the primary challenges you see in obtaining reliable data from Ethiopia’s food systems, and how do these challenges impact policymaking?
Lawrence Haddad: I think there’s maybe four big challenges. And they’re not unique to Ethiopia. Most countries face them.
The first challenge is infrastructure. Food needs to connect farmers to markets. You need good roads. To connect, to make sure that food isn’t spoiled or lost along the way from farm to market, you need good storage facilities; you need cold chains. You need electricity to be in most places. So, I think infrastructure is important, and then when you get to the marketplace, you need good market infrastructure too. You need good drainage. You need markets that are not going to get blown away by wind or rain or whatever natural disaster there is. So, I think infrastructure is a big challenge. And I know that’s a priority for the government, so that’s good. The infrastructure development needs to think about food a bit more, maybe. We need to lower the cost of moving food around, because that way consumers will have lower food prices and farmers will get better returns. That’s the first one.
The second one is policy. Ethiopia has lots of policies and has been very good at developing policies and implementing policies too at the federal level. But sometimes some of those policies are working against each other. So if you want to produce and supply healthier foods for everyone, you need to have an agricultural policy that says we’re going to do research and development on vegetables and fruits and legumes. Not only on cereals. You need a health program, a health policy that recognizes the importance of healthy diets for all kinds of disease prevention. But you also need climate policies, trade policies, transport policies, infrastructure policies, that all feed into the same objective. That’s another one policy, we call it policy coherence. All the policies have to be pulling in the same direction.
And then the third piece I would say would be data. We don’t have very good data on food systems. Well, and that’s not true. We do have good data, but it’s in 50 different places. So, one has to go to 50 different websites to get it. We need to put it all in one place so that you can see if vegetable consumption in Ethiopia is low, which it is. Is that because the yields of vegetables are very low? Is it because there’s a lot of vegetables that are lost in transport? Is it because the Ethiopian culture just says vegetables are low priority? Is it because most of the vegetables Ethiopia produces are exported for foreign exchange? Why is it that vegetable consumption is low? Maybe it’s unaffordable, maybe it’s too expensive? So getting all the data in one place means you can see whether it is low productivity, high waste and loss, lack of R&D to vegetables, poor infrastructure, so you can really diagnose your food system.
And then the final one I think really is engaging the private sector. The private sector is a very big player in the food system. Think about it, farmers are entrepreneurs, but so are millers and wholesale storage companies, finance companies, and transport companies, and refrigeration companies. These are all businesses in the food system. Very often they’re small and medium enterprises. They need to be supported in an enabling way. They need to be able to do business easily. They need to have access to commercial finance. They need to have access to information and technology. So, we need to find better ways of engaging with the private sector to make sure that nutritious food that is affordable is flowing to people.
Capital: You mentioned that Ethiopia’s food system needs immediate action. What specific actions do you believe should be prioritized to improve access to nutritious diets?
Lawrence Haddad: That’s difficult and I don’t really want to prioritize because Ethiopia has a set of priorities and I think they’re all good. I do think data is important. I think data is important because it guides decisions but also having the data in one place brings everyone together. It brings the different Ministries together, it brings business, civil society together to say what are, what is the data we need to improve our food systems. So, I do think data is important, I think the private sector is important and I think a determined focused active government is important. I’ve been here four days so far this week and I’ve met with three different Ministries, either the State minister or the Minister, and I’ve been impressed by how focused, how determined, how ambitious they are, and how knowledgeable they are.
The challenge is to make sure that their vision and their plans can be implemented, and that requires motivated, well-equipped staff who can make things happen.
Capital: Can you explain how the FSD works and its significance in tracking food system changes?
Lawrence Haddad: Think about it as flying a plane. If you fly a plane, and you don’t have an instrument panel, you have to rely only on what you can see. So, you may not be able to see turbulence up ahead, you can’t see that. You can’t see if you’re flying too low and you might crash into a mountain. You have to rely on your instrument panel on your airplane. And so, we need something like that for a food system. To guide us, we need a dashboard, a set of indicators that’s telling us, are we flying into the mountain or are we flying in the direction we want to fly in. So otherwise, we’re flying blind and that’s not good.
Capital: What lessons have been learned from implementing the FSD in Africa regarding food supply chains and nutrition?
Lawrence Haddad: The key thing we’ve learned again from implementing dashboards and developing dashboards, food system dashboards in places like Nigeria, Kenya, Mozambique, is there are three phases bringing everyone together, all the different stakeholders, governments, statistical offices, businesses. Civil society, universities, bring them together and say, look, we could each of us come up with a list of 100 indicators to track, but we can’t, we literally cannot track that many indicators. So, which are the really high priority ones? Which are the core ones that everyone can agree on? So that’s the first stage. How many things are we going to track? How many circles on our instrument panel do we need? Do we just need one speedometer? No, we need an altitude meter. We need one more, something that’s going to tell us if the plane’s banking left or right or this way or that way. We need something about the oxygen pressure in the compartment. We need more than one indicator, but we don’t need 100. So that’s the first thing. Which are the indicators that are really essential and how many.
The second phase is pulling the data together, getting a web platform that makes it really easy for anyone, to go into this website and say, “what do the data look like on this topic for this region of Ethiopia?” So that’s the second phase, building it to make it easy to use. So, build it from a user perspective.
And the third part is building the capacity of people to use it. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean people will use it. There are lots and lots of Apps out there that everyone, all of my friends and colleagues say, “you should use this app, it’s great”. But I’m like, well, it’s too much effort. I never get around to it. And when I do try, it seems at first quite complicated. But if someone shows me how to use it, even for five or 10 minutes, I’m like, yeah, this can help me in what I want to do. And it’s not that difficult. So I think the key is to make these dashboards user friendly and also to make people who are users see how it will help them do their work.
The final lesson we’ve learned is that the government has to take ownership. It can’t be a project for two years and the project finishes and no one ever uses it again. The way to do that is to encourage and support government departments to take on the dashboard. So in Nigeria, the Ministry of Planning has said “we will now take over the dashboard. It’s ours. It’s not GAINS, it’s not FAO’s, it’s ours.”
Capital: How does the Food System Countdown Initiative (FSCI) support policymakers in making informed decisions about food systems?
Lawrence Haddad: So the countdown is a smaller set of indicators. And it’s the ones that will, maybe the government of Ethiopia will decide to report to the UN at every food system summit follow-up. The food system summit was in 2021, and every two years there is a progress report that has to go to the UN Deputy Secretary General, Amina Muhammad. And that may be a set of indicators that the government will report on every year.
Capital: What broad lessons have emerged from previous FSCI reports that can guide future actions in Ethiopia?
Lawrence Haddad: I think we’ve done some countdown reports already. Some of the interesting things are the trade-offs between different areas. There’s five areas in the countdown. I can’t remember the more I think, but there’s healthy diets, there’s environment, there’s resilience, governance and sustainability. There’re five areas, but some of these areas, if you improve this thing, one of the areas might go down. So, the countdown has shown where the trade-offs are.
I think that’s really important for policymakers to know. If you move this thing forward, you might be moving this other thing backwards. So, the countdowns have really helped that. And I think they’ve given governments a sense of where they’re moving forward fast and where they’re lagging behind. And it helps them figure out what to do, looking ahead.
Capital: Looking ahead, what is your vision for the future of Ethiopia’s food systems over the next decade?
Lawrence Haddad: I’d like to see a food system that’s more diverse. Diversity is really important. Because diversity makes you think about farmers and things you can do. It’s one of the most fragile livelihoods, farmers worry about that.
When was the last time you worried about when the weather was going to affect your ability to do your job? When was the last time you worried about the weather when it was going to affect your ability to do your job? Farmers worry every day about that. So it’s a very fragile livelihood, very dependent on the weather, a whole range of things and pests and all sorts of natural hazards that we don’t have to worry about.
So, we have to make sure that farmers have support to grow a diverse set of crops. That’s good for their resilience, it’s good for their income diversification and it’s good for diet diversification. It’s also good for biodiversity. So I think I’d like to see a more diverse food system where you’re growing more different types of crops in more regions, more local, and you’re doing it in a more diverse group of people is growing food, it’s not just men of a certain age, but more women, more youth and I think that would be my vision – a diverse food system that is thriving and resilient to shocks, producing healthy food at an affordable rate, produced sustainably.
Capital: How important is international collaboration in achieving the goals set forth by the EFS process and the broader SDGs?
Lawrence Haddad: I think international cooperation is important because it offers opportunities for Ethiopia to access resources that are out there, whether they’re financial resources or knowledge resources or know-how. Knowledge is not the same as know-how or technical assistance resources. I think international collaboration is important, but I think critically the government of Ethiopia needs to be the one saying, this is what we need. Not partners like GAIN saying, this is what you need.
So when we in this workshop today share information on the dashboard and the countdown initiative, if the stakeholders in Ethiopia and the government say, we don’t want a dashboard, we don’t want a countdown tracking mechanism, then they are accountable to the people of Ethiopia and that’s their right to say that. So, I think international collaboration is important, but I think even more important is within country collaboration, getting government, business, universities, civil society working together because these problems are complicated and they’re big and they require collaboration and alignment.
It doesn’t mean that everyone has to do everything together, but it just means we know you’re doing this, and you’re going to do that, and you’re going to do that, and everything is sort of pointing in the same direction. That’s very important. Again, we work a lot in alliances within country.
Capital: How can we ensure that marginalized groups, including people with disabilities, are included in food system transformation efforts?
Lawrence Haddad: I think you have to be very intentional and deliberate about inviting them in. There’s that old expression that if you’re not at the table, you’re kind of on the menu, if you know what I mean.
So you have to be there to fight for your views, to fight for your issues, and you have to be heard. And so I think it’s important that they are intentionally welcomed into that decision-making space and actually are represented in the governance of that decision-making space. If they’re not, everyone will lose out.
They will certainly lose out, but everyone will lose out because another type of diversity is the knowledge they bring to the table, a diverse kind of knowledge. So it’s a different type of knowledge and they have a very different perspective, whether they’re from disability groups or indigenous groups or pastoralist groups, they have different types of knowledge that will enrich the more formal types of knowledge.
Capital: What steps can be taken to address social inequalities that affect access to nutritious food within Ethiopia’s diverse communities?
Lawrence Haddad: I think safety net programs are really important for mitigating and minimizing social inequalities, like Productive Safety Net Programs. I think school is very important for maximizing social mobility. So it’s very important that kids stay in school, and I would say this because I’m at a nutrition organization -but kids who are malnourished in the first two years of life, they will not do well in school. They will not do well in the labor market. Their brains are literally affected, physically affected by malnutrition. So early childhood malnutrition and well-nourished young women some of whom will go on to be mothers, I think it’s the key to social mobility. Better nutrition, better education. And you know, it’s the groups that are socially disadvantaged that are the ones that are mostly malnourished.
