Calories are cheap, nutrition is expensive, with Ana Maria Loboguerrero

You're now the director of Adaptive and Equitable Food Systems.

Why are these systems so important?

One reason is because of climate change.

And what we are experiencing is that climate change is becoming a real challenge, especially for small-scale farmers.

And these are the farmers that, one, they produce in many countries.

They are the ones that produce most of the food.

But two, they're the ones that are really suffering all the impacts when the droughts or the floods come.

So the adapted piece of the adapted and equitable food systems addresses that, addresses how do we make sure that these small scale farmers that are being really impacted, climate change, that they have the tools, they have the knowledge, they have the capacity to implement innovations that can help them to reduce these impacts and especially for small-scale farmers that they for them you know having rainfall or not makes a huge difference in terms of bringing food to the family or not or losing everything that they have so so These food systems, they really need to be able to address the issue of producing food when climate is changing.

And then why equitable food systems? Because these food systems need to work for everybody, for both men and women.

And what we have seen is that the same way that I was saying that small-scale farmers are the ones that are hit hardest because of climate change, among these small-scale farmers, what we have seen is that women are especially impacted more than men.

And it's not because they cannot react to climate change.

It's because if you go into the causes of these impacts, differences is because many times they don't have access to the finance, they don't have access to the information, many times they don't have lands.

So all these compounds into women being the ones that are suffering the most, but at the same time, the ones that have the opportunity to really thrive and to implement innovations that can be beneficial for everybody in terms of these food systems.

So yeah, so this is at the end, the third piece that is really important is that these food systems also need to provide healthy food.

So it's not only the quantity of the food that these farmers are producing, but it's also what are the crops that are being grown and are they benefiting or not everybody in the society.

Adapted and equitable food systems really speak about the importance of thinking about these three dimensions, having a holistic approach, the climate dimension, the gender dimension, and the nutrition dimension.