The leaders of the G7 (the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom) met in early June for the annual G7 Summit. The resulting Leaders’ Declaration addressed a variety of global issues, including climate change, trade, and epidemics.
In terms of food security, the group set the ambitious goal of lifting 500 million people out of hunger and malnutrition by 2030 as part of the Post-2015 Development Agenda. The Broad Food Security and Nutrition Development Agenda, set out in the Annex to the Leaders’ Declaration , focuses on supporting rural growth and transformation, promoting responsible investment strategies and sustainable agriculture, improving the effectiveness and transparency of development programs, and ensuring that nutrition remains a priority.
The Agenda emphasizes the need to include women and youth in rural transformation strategies, and the need to take demographic shifts into account as more and more people move into urban areas. Rural transformation will include the promotion of agricultural and food value chains to link smallholders with markets and increase non-farm employment and incomes.
The Agenda also addresses the need for improved land tenure laws and increased focus on sustainable resource use, and pledged to make agricultural research and development and technological innovations more accessible to developing countries and the rural poor. In terms of nutrition, the Agenda laid out a multi-sectoral approach to scaling up nutrition-sensitive and nutrition-specific interventions in key sectors, including agricultural, social safety nets, water, sanitation and hygiene, health, education, and food systems. The approach will focus on women of reproductive age, pregnant women, nursing mothers, and children under five.
The leaders also committed to making G7 development strategies more transparent and effective. These goals will include linking G7 activities with existing strategies in developing countries, such as the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) and the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement. Development progress will be monitored and reported, and the G7 will make efforts to improve country-level accountability.