Blog Post

Turkey G20 Report on Opportunities for Economic Growth and Job Creation

In a report to the G20 Development Working Group released in September of last year, FAO and the OECD (with inputs from the Asian Development Bank, IFAD, ILO, IFPRI, and WTO) discussed the vital role that food security plays in the G20’s overall growth agenda. Food insecurity and malnutrition come with a high economic cost, reducing countries’ human capital and decreasing productivity and opportunities for growth. Investing in agricultural productivity and the integration of smallholder farmers into markets will not only improve food security, it will also increase incomes and create jobs throughout the agricultural sector.

G20 countries have a significant impact on the global food system through their production, imports and exports, domestic agricultural policies, trade policies, energy use, and financial regulations. These countries also hold significant global power as providers of development assistance, food aid, and technological support. As such, the report calls on the G20 to mobilize its power to address global food and nutrition security issues.
Specifically, the report recommends that the G20 should expand on its food security efforts in the following ways:

  • Use its comparative advantages in collective actions to provide global public goods and promote policy dialogues and political support;
  • Integrate food security into the core G20 agenda surrounding broader economic growth and jobs;
  • Recognize the linkages between food security, agriculture, and growth and target effective programs that will impact productivity and growth and promote the transformation of smallholder agriculture;
  • Ensure that existing initiatives have beneficial impacts on food security and the rural sector, paying particular attention to rural infrastructure, improved market access, reduced food losses, job creation, and human resource development, particularly for women and youth;
  • Support the adoption of more coherent global policies and the avoidance of all policies that will negatively impact world food markets, and promote further reforms of trade and agricultural policies that have the potential to undermine food security in low income countries; and
  • Continue the successful ongoing G20 collective actions, such as [AMIS]( http://www.amis-outlook.org/ ).