By Kefiloe Kajane
The Prime Minister Moeketsi Majoro this week told the United Nations Food Systems Summit held in New York that Lesotho is commited towards transforming its food systems into sustainable systems that could deliver food security and nutrition for all.
Majoro said this will be in a manner that takes cognizance of economic, social and environmental impacts during production, distribution and consumption.
He indicated that these commitments represent views expressed by a diverse set of stakeholders including farmers, nutritionists, distributors, value chain participants, youth, civil society, women and policy makers.
“The outcome of the food systems dialogues is a strong multi-stakeholder commitment to strengthening food systems capacity and systematically addressing its clearly well-understood challenges. Another important outcome of the dialogues is that the country is implementing solutions to many of these challenges, but not in a manner that can ensure the transformation of the entire agriculture economy, and thus wasting many of the efforts deployed today.
“For its part, the government has prioritized agriculture and nutrition in its development plans and actions. But to strengthen Lesotho’s food systems, it is important to address simultaneously the elements of the food security value chains in their entirety.”
“This includes recapitalising agriculture, transferring farming technology including widespread use of digital technology, commercialising the agriculture sector, adopting climate-smart and sensitive operations.”
