April 28: Stakeholders this week announced the Kathmandu Statement to nurture resilient food systems with a commitment for a nutrition-secure South Asia.

The announcement was made during the the second dialogue event organised in Kathmandu by the South Asian Policy Leadership for Improved Nutrition and Growth (SAPLING) on improving agri-food systems. According to a statement issued by the organisers, the event was held on April 24 and 25.

The SAPLING initiative was launched in 2019 with the aim to drive a ‘food systems approach’ to combat malnutrition in South Asia in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations.

This week’s event saw the participation of over 60 delegates from SAPLING member countries - Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India and Bhutan.

The event was co-hosted by the National Planning Commission (NPC)of Nepal, BRAC Bangladesh - the current SAPLING Secretariat, IPE Global Limited, an Indian development sector think-tank, and the Institute for Integrated Development Studies (IIDS), Nepal, a not-for-profit think-tank headquartered in Kathmandu. SAPLING is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

According to the organisers, the first day of the event focussed on setting the context. Siddharth Chaturvedi, senior programme officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spoke on the need for and importance of having a regional platform for consensus building among various stakeholders for mainstreaming evidence-based policy, action and leadership to combat malnutrition in line with policymakers' needs and priorities through an agri-food system lens.

Kewal Prasad Bhandari, secretary of the National Planning Commission acknowledged the need for inter-government collaboration and also bringing together private sector partners and other relevant stakeholders.

The second day featured a policymakers' roundtable where high-level government dignitaries from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Nepal discussed the priorities, the agendas for regional collaboration for strengthening agri-food systems and the modalities for the same. There was a brainstorming session on the use of technologies for Climate Smart Agriculture and Post-Harvest Loss Reduction to steer regional collaboration, added the statement.

Panel discussions were also held on how to create an enabling environment to promote cross-border private sector investments, and on steering knowledge collaborations and learning among SAPLING countries.

The experts and government officials participating in the event endorsed the need for having an initiative like SAPLING which could act as an agile regional platform to foster inter-governmental collaboration and perform the role of a knowledge aggregator around the use of climate-smart technologies, reducing post-harvest losses, improving food safety to pollinate learnings from the member countries across the region.