 The agri-food system is everything that is connected to food and agriculture. Well, when we eat from our mouths, all the way back to the way that food is sold, distributed and processed, and how food is grown in the fields, in the land, in the seas, and other products which are grown, which may not be food but fuel, fibre, involves a whole host of activities, investments, decisions, and an agri-food system pulls together all of this into a system. And what's really important and why we call it a system is that it's interconnected. So that means, for example, that if we want to grow fruits and vegetables in order that people eat healthier, we have to think not just about growing the vegetables, we have to think how they get to people. The agri-food system is exhausted. The way it's designed, the way it functions, means that it's weak, it lacks resilience, it's not strong enough, and it itself is worn out. So the challenge here is that the potential power of the agri-food system to provide these solutions isn't there until we transform the agri-food system to make it stronger and to help it provide the solutions we know it can provide. Some of the major challenges in the agri-food system include that the way that food is grown and the way that food is produced is contributing to climate change, which in turn weakens the agri-food system. It is producing the kind of food which is making people sick and when people are sick they can't function so well in the agri-food system, they're part of the agri-food system, so that makes it weaker. One thing we've done really wrong is to take diversity out of the system too much and we need to bring that diversity back in. So we need to think much more carefully about how we produce diversity which is also good for biodiversity, it's also good for the environment but it's also good for people because we need to have a diversity of food on our plate. The most important way we need to transform the system is to bring all of the system together and that means bringing all the people of the system together. At the moment one of the major challenges is that we're working separately. There were some people over here trying to fix biodiversity, there were some people over here trying to fix nutrition, there were some people over here trying to fix food safety, there were some people over here trying to fix poverty amongst livelihoods of agricultural producers and we're all operating in our separate spaces and that weakens us too. The thing that really needs to happen is for people to come together and say let's look at this as a system, let's work together as people in the system and figure out how to provide these solutions. The agrifood system to me really is a solution, it's a solution to the world's most important challenges. If you have a problem go to the agrifood system, you'll find a solution, you'll find a solution to climate change, you'll find a solution to biodiversity loss, you'll find a solution to malnutrition, you'll find a solution to chronic diseases, you'll find a solution to unsafe food, you'll find a solution to rural poverty, to lack of urban sustainability. What I'm hoping to see from the stock taking meeting two years following from the UN Food Systems Summit is that governments and many other stakeholders come and attend and share their successes and share their challenges in making change. What I'm hoping for is for an open and honest discussion about what's happening but also that it's tough. Making these changes is not easy. The ideal outcome is that the momentum that has been created will continue and that the commitment to change will not just stay as commitment but will lead to actions on the ground to really make change. Y Llywodraeth Cymru