A wave of self-organised youth-led groups across the world has joined the growing momentum behind the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit.
Young champions from Brazil to India, Cameroon to Fiji, and more than 100 countries around the world have been engaging in public debates across the five priority areas or Action Tracks, which include food security and nutrition, sustainable consumption, environmental protection, poverty and resilience.
Where the Summit’s Action Tracks work to highlight the essential pathways to support the transformation of food systems and progress toward Agenda
2030 at local, national, regional, and global levels, a set of cross-cutting Levers of Change focus on key barriers to progress and areas of their linkages and coordinated action.
Youth empowerment is so important to food systems transformation that it has been placed into all Summit work streams and structures. Young leaders have been included among the vice-chairs for the Action Tracks, while youth empowerment is a common theme across four “levers of change” identified by Summit organisers as among the most influential factors for delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.
During the Summit’s 24-hour Global Relay Conversation on World Food Day last year, Sophie Healy-Thow, a youth hunger and nutrition advocacy from Ireland, noted that “there are young people situated in every decision-making place within the Food Systems Summit and that’s completely new.” Sophie and many youth leaders like her have signed up as Food Systems Heroes to commit to improving food systems in their own communities.