 Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining this afternoon's webinar. I give the floor to Aliyudia who will facilitate today's event. Thank you and Aliyudia, the floor is yours. Bonjour à tous. Bonjour à tous. Je suis le Docteur Aliyudia, director de programme de santé à l'école, santé scolaire au niveau du ministère de l'éducation nationale au Sénégal. Bienvenue à tous les participants, participants et conférenciés. Nous sommes très heureux de vous avoir parmi nous aujourd'hui. Nous avons un programme très riche sur un thème qui présente beaucoup d'intérêt, mais qui est rarement exploré en détail lors de ces événements. La décoration nutritionnelle est la qualité de la nourriture scolaire et la façon d'y s'y rendre. Au Sénégal, à travers le programme d'amélioration de la qualité de l'équité et de la transparence paquée 2018-2030, l'alimentation scolaire est identifiée par le gouvernement comme un levier majeur pour permettre à davantage d'enfants d'âge scolaire d'accéder à une éducation de qualité dans un environnement protecteur et simple. Le programme présidentiel de canton scolaire de PCS cible prioritairement les zones rurales et les zones périurbaines bien favorable afin d'assurer de meilleures conditions d'apprentissage et de réussite scolaire. Cette vision entre en droite ligne avec l'engagement de l'union africaine qui a adopté l'approche alimentation scolaire sur la production locale comme un instrument clé pour atteindre les objectifs d'accès à l'école pour chaque fille et chaque garçon tout en réduisant les disparités liées à la pauvreté et ce en lien avec les orientations de la stratégie continentale de l'éducation pour l'Afrique 2016-2025 et de l'agenda 2063 pour le développement de l'Afrique. L'émergence de la pandémie COVID-19 ainsi que les défis urgent en matière de développement ont mis en évidence le rôle essentiel de l'alimentation scolaire en particulier aux écoles vulnérables. La perturbation de la fermeture des écoles dans le monde ont eu un impact négatif non seulement sur le droit des enfants à l'éducation mais aussi sur le droit à une amélioration et à une nutrition adéquate. Maintainir et augmenter la qualité nutritionnelle des repas et impératifs pour soutenir l'alimentation des enfants et de leurs familles non seulement pendant la période de stabilité mais aussi en tant que réponse essentielle pendant les crises et après le rétablissement. L'accent mis sur la qualité et la durabilité ne devrait pas être un fondamental. Aujourd'hui, nous entendons parler des impacts de l'alimentation, du contenu de l'alimentation et des repas scolaires en particulier aux priorités nutritionnelles des enfants de la nécessité de veiller à ce que les éléments clés du système alimentaire local soit mis en compte lors de la conception et de la mise en œuvre des normes en la matière dont les différents pays ont adopté ces normes et des conseils sur l'évolution des circonstances et de nouvelles crises. C'est ce que je voulais dire dans l'introduction et passer la parole à notre première paneliste. Excellences, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure for me to address this event focusing on nutrition standards for school food. I want to thank the government of Japan for hosting the Nutrition for Growth event which brings governments together to achieving better nutrition results. I also want to congratulate the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Programme and the World Health Organization for bringing this topic to the table. Dear friends, school meals are much more than just a plate of food. When done right, school meals programs can support local agriculture, improve health, nutrition, education, make communities more resilient, promote gender equality, provide jobs and teach children about the importance of sustainable lifestyles and healthy diets. This year Finland and France in close collaboration with member states from north to south, the WFP and many other partners built a global schools meals coalition to ensure that every child receives a nutritious and healthy meal in school by 2030. The school meals coalition was launched in September during the Food Systems Summit with more than 60 member countries and more joining every day. I made a personal commitment to act as global school feeding champion, reaching out to partners and advocating for programs worldwide. Governments do recognize that recovering from the pandemic and building a more sustainable and resilient world will require policies that help tackle several challenges at once. We must think systemically. School meal programs are one of those systemic solutions. In Finland, free of charge school meals have been provided since the 1940s. Initially to address post-war poverty and malnutrition. Later the national school meal system has proven to be an investment in the future and in the economic and social welfare of the whole society. And therefore, from our own experience, priorities should be given to maintaining and increasing the nutrition quality of meals to support the diets of children and their families. The focus on nutrition quality and sustainability should not be an afterthought of school meal programs and policies, but rather one of the fundamental aims. The event today is specifically about the issue of quality. We will hear about how countries have made sure children get food that is safe, healthy and nutritious according to their needs. It is also important to discuss how local food systems are considered when designing and implementing nutrition standards. We will also hear from a young activist and hear her plea for free quality meals for children. The bottom line, in my opinion, is finding new ways that improve the quality of diets of school children, thus directly contributing to the goals of the global school meals coalition. I hope this event contributes to achieving our ambitious goals for the benefit of our children and their future. Thank you so much for your attention. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Kinnari, for this video. We will now move on to the second presenter, Carmen. Good morning. Good afternoon to everyone. My name is Carmen Burbano. I'm the director of the World Food Program's school-based programs division. And it's really a pleasure to be here today also following Minister Villis-Kinnari, the Minister of Development Corporation of Finland. Before I start, I just wanted to mention, because I see in the chat a lot of you still struggling with the interpretation. I just want to give you a tip. In the bottom right-hand corner of your screen, you have a little button that says interpretation. If you click there, you can choose your language. Anyway, let me just start. The organizers have asked me to explain a little bit more. What is this School Meals Coalition that Minister Kinnari was talking about? In fact, earlier this year, in the context of the Food Systems Summit, 61 countries joined with more than 55 partners to join this really global call to action. So to start, let me tell you where that coalition comes from, what the story is. Before the pandemic, we had information that 388 million children were receiving meals in schools. And if we can go to the first slide, you can see a map of what this looks like. Basically what it looked like before the pandemic is that we had unprecedented global reach of school meals programs worldwide. This was the largest safety net supporting children in the world. And as you can see here, almost every country had sorted this out, of course, with different levels of coverage, but in a way, this was a massive, massive safety net. We also have information, and this all comes from WFP's State of School Feeding Worldwide publication, that countries not only had established and established this massive safety net, but also in the course of the last eight years, they had institutionalized these programs. These programs had 80% of countries had national policies or laws associated to school feeding. 90% of the funding for the programs worldwide was coming from domestic budgets. Although in low income countries, we still had a problem of an over-reliance on donors and on international organizations. And we also have information that before the pandemic, these programs were not just about meals. They were actively integrated with other health and nutrition interventions. So if we go to the second slide, we can see that 90% of the governments were also implementing school meals alongside other health and nutrition interventions. And what you can see here in this particular graph is that any of the marks in blue, basically if you look at all countries, something like 90% of the countries were implementing school meals programs alongside between three and seven interventions. These could be, for example, water and sanitation. It could be supplementation. It could be deworming. It could be vaccinations and other kinds of school health and nutrition complementary approaches. So what we really saw before the pandemic is that these programs were being consolidated. They were being improved in terms of their quality and they were expanding globally. Now the pandemic hit, as we all know, and 90% of the children in the world were sent home. Education systems effectively collapsed. And with that collapse came the collapse of this massive safety net. So if we go to the next slide, this is what the world looked like last year. 370 million children lost access to meals. This is coming out of WFP's monitoring of the effects of the pandemic on school meals and school-based services for children. And this basically smashed a decade of progress in this safety net. Based out of this and out of this experience in 2020, France and Finland, as you saw in the video, came together to say we need to do something. These programs are really key for pandemic recovery and for response for four main reasons. If we go to the next slide, we can see that countries were convinced that these programs go really far beyond the plate of food. These are investments that economically can give us at least $9 in return for every dollar that it's invested in these programs. And this is because of four main reasons. One, as I was saying, is because they are a primary social protection measure around the world. They support disparities. They eliminate disparities. They support specifically vulnerable households with income, indirect income. They are also really important education tools. They provide the incentive for children, especially girls, to go to school, but also they support and aid learning. There's a third sector that's also very much involved in this, which is the agriculture sector. When these programs are combined with local purchase, they provide markets to farmers. They create jobs locally. And in general, they provide more sustainable food systems all around. And finally, a health and nutrition benefit, which is directly associated with better eating habits with tackling hunger and under nutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, but also increasingly overweight, obesity, and just the general problems that come from children not having the right nutrition habits early in life. These programs can help tackle all of those things simultaneously becoming really a powerful platform for community development. So based on that and based on that conviction, governments came together and in September launched the School Meals Coalition. Let me show you what it's about. In the next slide, you have the goal of the coalition. The goal of countries that came together, this is a government-led coalition, was that every child have the opportunity to receive a healthy and nutritious meal in school by 2030. This is an ambitious goal. It's a global goal because governments felt that this applies both to high income, middle income, and low income countries across the board. Now three particular objectives were chosen. One, which was really about restoring what we had before the pandemic. We really need to go back to the coverage and supporting children that were receiving these meals before and that lost access to them as we open up schools safely. The second objective had to do with reaching the children that were being missed even before the pandemic. We know that there were at least 73 million children that were missing out on school meals even before the pandemic. These are in low income countries. And so the second objective is really about pooling resources and support for low income countries to be able to achieve at least the minimum levels of coverage that are needed for children in these settings. And the third objective applies across the board, and really is the focus, I think, of the meeting today, is about quality, is about how these programs can become truly the platform that we all hope they can be, including better and more nutritious food, including better and healthier environments for children in schools, and including the connection to all of these complementary approaches on school health and nutrition, and of course better nutrition standards for these meals in countries. Let me just go really quickly through a few more slides to show you what the coalition is really about. Here you have the 61 countries that have joined. You can see that they belong to almost all the regions of the world, and you could see that they are from all income levels. So this really illustrates what I was saying, that countries across the board have seen the value of implementing domestically these programs, but also supporting other countries to do the same. And they're not alone. Even though governments lead the coalition, they are supported. In the next slide, we can see that by 58 partners that have signed the declaration of support. So share with us the next slide, please. So many partners, too difficult, of course, to name them all. So that's why we also always put them in the slide. UN agencies, NGOs, academia, think tanks, multilateral organizations, foundations, regional bodies, et cetera, the list actually goes on and on because partners are joining every day. And the role of these partners is really to support governments both at the global level, at the regional level, and at the country level to achieve the goals of the coalition. Now let me end by saying that one of the most important aspects of the coalition are the initiatives that were launched to support governments achieve these goals and to address some of the major bottlenecks that we see on the ground. So let's go to the last slide. And let me tell you about the five initiatives. The first one is a research consortium that was launched in May of this year, led by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This initiative is specifically designed in academia to have academia come together and support decision makers in countries with better evidence for better decision making. So this is really geared towards countries with bringing evidence to the forefront of those decisions. A financing task force led by the Global Education Commission was designed particularly to find more sustainable sources of funding financing for these programs in low-income countries. A peer-to-peer community of best practice led by the government of Germany to help governments share with each other their experiences with these programs. A fourth initiative, a monitoring and data initiative led by WFP, which is going to establish a global database for school meals and issue a worldwide report every two years to track progress. And a fifth initiative on advocacy and outreach. I'm stopping there because I can see my time is just about to be over. But just to say that the topic of this meeting, the issue of nutrition standards is intimately related to the goals of the coalition and also to the initiatives. Thank you so much. Merci beaucoup. Nous allons passer au second présentateur. Catherine, vous avez la parole. Thank you very much. I hope you can hear me okay. So hello to all. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Thank you to everyone who made the side event happen and it's a great pleasure to be a part of this collaborative event. I am not sure I think my slides are going to come up. There you go. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I'm going to talk about school food and nutrition standards more broadly following Carmen's talk and provide insights from WTO to the guideline development process on school food and nutrition policies. Next slide, please. So you might know the next slide that's going to come up shortly. Why focus on schools? Carmen talked about it already. We know that optimal nutrition throughout the life course is crucial for example to maximize children's own intellectual potential in school performance and to secure the health of future generations. So schools are really key settings for health. The recent WTO UNESCO publication on global standards to make every school a health promoting school for example has one of the standards saying that school policies must ensure a safe environment for all members of the school community. So in line with this standard it's critical to ensure that the school food environment helps address all forms of malnutrition. This is of course not without challenges and a key challenge for a global approach or global guidance on school food nutrition policies and what schools can do for children's nutrition and food system transformation is the double burden of malnutrition. Next slide, please. So while under nutrition of course there remains a global public health concern rates of overweight and obesity among children under five and of school age children are on the rise. So 18% of school age children and adolescents are no overweight and overweight and obesity and childhood and adolescents are of course associated with adverse health consequences later in life. So when we speak about school food nutrition standards we as a public health community to ensure that children have access to both adequate and nutritious food at all times including as much as possible also in times of crises whether caused by conflict disease outbreaks or disasters. Next slide, please. So over the years tremendous effort has been made to improve the quality of school meals but we still come across recipes that may have high levels of salt or that do not specify the preferred fats and oils that are healthier and as we heard already from Minister Skinari the health and safety of school food should not be an afterthought. We need to have a change in mindset but we might face some resistance as improving the quality of meals in schools may mean for example reviewing or revising existing contracts with suppliers, caterers and vendors or grant agreements that may apply for example to food donations. Next slide, please. So what do we actually refer to when we talk about school food and nutrition standards? This can be a set of criteria standards rules that specify what food will be allowed to be served or sold in specific public settings like schools and are purchased by the government of course it may also apply to food donations. These may be nutrient based or food based criteria related for example to the preparation methods or service modalities they can apply to foods or beverages. Next slide please. So here are a few examples of nutrient based standards maybe one where schools require that all processed or ultra processed food products must contain less than 10% of total energy from fat as is available in El Salvador or procurement agencies. Here the example of the Indian integrated child development scheme and the midday meal scheme are advised not to procure and use trans fat containing fats and oil and aspartium the preparation of food and they should also desist from procuring food products prepared using margarine or bakery shortening. So in the case of India 16 million beneficiaries receive this scheme per day which shows the impact it can have. So looking at food based standards sorry they're swapped in the order on the slide looking at food based standards prohibiting sweet and sweetened drinks including soft drinks juices diet beverages slushies etc etc can be banned for the sale in canteens kiosks or vending machines in schools as is being done in Israel or the sale of energy dense non-nutrient density foods around schools can also be restricted as in the case of Korea. Next slide please. So this next slide which is going to come up shortly shows data from the global database on implementation of nutrition actions thanks to my colleague Kaya for putting this together the scope of school based food and beverage measures which is reported by 81 member states on the survey showing that most measures were actually about foods and beverages offered at school lunches or other meals followed by measures on foods and beverages sold in cafeterias or vending machines here about half of the responses were from high income countries which is a concern because most of the information we have on this the school standards in general comes from from high income countries 16 low and middle income countries reported on measures. Next slide please. So I'll just now spend the last couple of minutes remaining to share information on the video guideline work in forthcoming guidelines on school food nutrition policies. So the objectives of the guidelines are to guide member states in the development and implementation of effective evidence-informed school food nutrition policies to enable advocacy for implementation of these policies to create healthy school food environments and of course to facilitate development of healthy dietary patterns among all children. So the target population includes children in preschool primary and secondary schools so all children above the age of two. The WHO guideline development work is supported by an external group of experts and this guideline development group the GDG for this guideline defined the focus to be on five interventions that influence school food environment including standards or rules that determine the quality of food served and sold around schools. The five interventions that you can see on the screen were defined building on the results of the scoping review that was commissioned but also considering recommendations recently published by WHO and UNESCO on school health services which also cover for example the provision of nutrition education or screening of non-nutritional problems. Next slide please. So WHO commissioned one systematic review on the effects of policies or interventions that influence the school food environment including standards. The challenges I alluded to earlier is that global guideline recommendations on standards need to consider all forms of non-nutrition. The focus on evaluation studies has actually been quite narrow looking at very specific questions for example at whether nutrition standards increase the availability of healthy food at schools compared to not having standards or whether nutrition standards impact the availability of healthy beverages in schools. So the impact of having nutrition standards was then assessed on a set of outcomes of interest that was also defined by the guideline development group where these outcomes of interest are also quite complex. They include consumption of healthy foods and non-alcoholic beverages in schools, consumption of discretionary foods, nutrients or calorie content of food, dietary intake but also educational outcomes. Importantly the systematic review team encountered several daily limitations, challenges and research gaps including the heterogeneity of date and the target foods included in standards and most of the evidence coming for example from high income countries and that the evidence is based on high risk of bias studies. So unfortunately the systematic review is not yet finalized so you can't share the data but as I'll show on the next slide we have conducted and published reviews of contextual factors to support the guideline development process. When developing a WTO guideline and its recommendation explicit consideration must be given to decision criteria, the contextual factors, when moving from the evidence on the impact of recommendations to the actual recommendation at the end. So the factors considered in this review were values, resource implications, equity, human rights, feasibility and acceptability. We reviewed 350 publications in total and much was on nutrition standards. So looking at resource implications for example it depends on whether a country develops a new standard or revises standards whether the focus is to increase the uptake of the standard for example from just primary schools to all schools or if new standards for example require that certain foods are served. So importantly standards are in line with human rights. So some of the countries actually that have published information on this their laws are driven by a rights-based approach. For example Brazil, Honduras, or strong rights-based approach. So interestingly we also found inequalities may remain after implementation of the standards. I'll quickly go to the next slide and then wrap up so I'll skip over to show that nutrition standards are largely acceptable by a range of stakeholders and the final slide just with a couple of key messages showing that we do need to focus on schools that school food policies need to be coherent and that we need to strengthen the evidence base and pointed already to the Global Research Consortium which will play an important role also in strengthening the evidence base for standards. Sorry for going a couple of seconds over time. Thank you for your attention. Merci. Merci Catherine de cette belle présentation et le prochain on our radar c'est Nancy et Melissa vous avez la parole. Dr. Dia, for allowing me the floor. Colleagues, so far we've already heard about why improving nutrition adequacy of school meals and school food in general is really essential for school children's diet quality and we've also heard some of the evidence around that and some examples, some specific examples of food and nutrition standards. Now in the next presentation we're going to take a deeper dive into the development of standards. Standards not only to ensure that school meals are returned to the nutrition needs of children and adolescents but also to diversify the school food basket to strengthen the pathways for meeting nutrition objectives of school meals programs to ensure that children and adolescents are entitled to the same benefits in terms of nutrition adequacy to help promote healthier food practices in children and adolescents and finally and perhaps most importantly nationalize children and adolescents right to an adequate food in schools. Now I come from FAO in partnership with WFP guided by the UN interagency consultative group and with generous funding from the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture has embarked on a process of developing a methodology to help countries around the world set their own context specific nutrition standards for school food with a real focus on school meals. Now the initiative is a direct response to a need that was expressed by countries and it's also was reflected in the outcome of a comprehensive review on nutrition guidelines and standards for school meals that was conducted in 33 low and middle income countries. The results of the review identified that one main gap was the lack of guidance and validated evidence-based processes for countries to derive their guidelines and standards. So now certainly the existence of standards and guidelines is not enough it's not enough to guarantee that the food available in schools responds to all the nutritional needs of children nor does it guarantee that food is actually being prepared and consumed in the intended way let alone that it's improving nutrition levels in children. However, standards and guidelines comprise a necessary step that demonstrates a commitment towards setting that minimum quality for school food and it can really be an effective tool to improve local food system if implemented in a coherent and multi-sectorial way. So now let's jump into that presentation and to do so I'm going to turn the floor over to Melissa Vargas who's going to present the details of this process and the expected features of the methodology. Melissa over to you. Thank you very much and thank you for being a colleague. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about this methodology that Nancy has just mentioned and we had also a definition since Catherine kindly shared with us the definition of nutrition guidelines and standards I will skip this. So as Nancy mentioned this work has come from a very valid need expressed by countries expressed by experts and research and it came very clear with a report that we did in 2018 with 33 low annual income points we have also been discussing with several agencies in a community of practice and you need for a specific methodology with a step-by-step guidance came from these discussions. So we have here why is a validated methodology needed. We know and it's very nice that we come at her that brings presentation because she mentioned what are the limitations of research in this area and it really depends on how the standards were derived and designed and invented. So we know that we need a step-by-step guidance, simple guidance that can be followed in a systematic way. We know that standards for school food and particularly for school meals are not one size fits all. We understand that the problems are different, the context is very different, so we know we need a process, a methodology and not to set international standards for all. We need to account for different types of data which I will explain to you in a minute. We need to adapt for contextual factors and situations of food systems of food supply chains and procurement mechanisms. We need to ensure that the process is imperative because we know that in some occasions what is presented or designed nutrition standards may not be feasible in terms of the actual meals or in terms of procurement mechanisms to not allow for buying specific ingredients or that the supply is not enough or not appropriate to comply with such standards. We also need a process that relies on modeling, on testing in different parts of process so we can make informed decision making. So this is just one part of what Nancy presented. We have this project in partnership with WFP and also supported by WHO, UNICEF and other agencies as consultative groups and the project is going to be piloted in Cambodia and Ghana. The main aim is to develop this global methodology in order for to set standards that are feasible that are food systems based and that are context-specific. What are the planned elements of this methodology? We firstly are working within specific guiding principles. We want to ensure that all the process of planning this methodology is guided by the following. That is iterative as I mentioned. That is systematic. That we have specific processes that are conducted in a transparent way. That it should be multi-storile because we know that there is not one sector that can ensure to have these standards that are appropriate for children's needs but are also feasible in terms of supply, in terms of procurement, in terms of affectability and in terms of targeting. So it really needs to involve different sectors. We want to ensure that this is participatory. We cannot keep having the main right-bearers, the children, the students, the school systems that are not implementing such standards out of the process or only at the end of the process. We will be transparent. We need to ensure that there is documentation of how the specific decisions were made or why adjustments were made. We need to ensure that this methodology and the final output of the methodology is on evidence and on actual needs, not on assumptions. And also we need something that is flexible because as we know in the current COVID pandemic, the school closures were a big hit. And this is one of the main aspects that we needed to ensure that it's adaptable so we can really modify the standards according to the situation, to the context crisis situations. And of course we need a process that allows for continuous improvement. Meaning that we have data that can fit into the process in a regular way so we can ensure if the standards are working in the high quality or not. We are intending to have a process that involves that have different types of data fitting into it. And of course we would definitely have a nutrition status of children with anthropometric data, the chemical or functional parameters. We need to understand the energy and the nutrients environments of the children, the age groups that we are targeting. We need to have data that is quite limited in school children and less specifically. We also need to have information and data on food behaviors that are going to affect the acceptability or the effects of such standards. And of course we need data on food completion which is growing every day more but they're still limited in many parts of the world. Melissa I'm afraid sorry I need to interrupt you but interpreters cannot hear you properly. Would it be possible to you? Maybe we can move your section to the next one and go on with the next speaker while we find a headset. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Melissa. And we're going to introduce the next speaker, Bruno, who will introduce us to the president. You have the floor. Thank you. Sorry for not being introduced. Good afternoon. Good evening. Depending on where you are right now I'm talking in the name of a sustainable school food that is led by Brazil along with the Brazil . Brazil for a long time, and I also talk about the Brazilian government, the Ministry of Education, the National Fund for Education Development, where the Brazilian school food program is included and where we manage the program to present a link between the advances that Brazil has established in the nutrition dimension of the school food program with the sustainable school food network that we have been developing for a few years in Latin America and in the Caribbean and trying to find a convergence point between the network and the coalition and the contribution that Brazil, leading this network, can bring to the coalition in the same way, on the other hand, can benefit from a collective action. Well, then the school food network is within the United Nations initiative of the United Nations of the Year, of the decade of food action, and it was constituted in a very spontaneous way because Brazil has a cooperation project with FAL, which is renewed many years since 2008-2009. The first projects were established in cooperation in the south-south and from then on Brazil works very close to the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean in the attempt to contribute to the implementation of school food programs in these countries. So, in 2018, this cooperation movement, it is structured, it is drawn as a spontaneous network that comes from the outside, the school food network, which is supported by the principles and by the aspects that we had already built and established over the years, and in whose principles the program of school food was also constituted. It is also the principles of the Brazilian program that we take to the countries because they are, in fact, the same that we find today in the goals of sustainable development in terms of reducing poverty, generation of income, reduction of hungry combat and the link between these actions of social protection and the actions of strengthening, establishing standards of quality for sustainable food. So, within the period of the pandemic, for those who are not familiar with the Brazilian program, the program attends 43 million students, it is universal within Brazil, attending all public schools, with an increase of around 800 million dollars per year. And 30% at the minimum of this resource is repassed to family farmers and more vulnerable social groups and then comes the reduction of poverty in Brazil, especially in the field, during a period when, in the absence of this process, Brazil left the hungry map in 2014, 2015, in the hungry map of the UN. So, the principles of how to achieve this are already known. But, in addition to this link with family farming, there are principles of nutrition that are very rigorous. So, during the pandemic, we managed to approve a resolution that established the standard of nutrition standards even more rigorous for school food. In 2020, there was a resolution, a normative of the program, aimed at an emergency, which is to allow the distribution of food, even with closed schools, but it came in June of 2020, and this resolution that has been built for two or three years in a participative process with many actors involved from nutritionists, researchers from universities, family farmers, indigenous people who could come to the government, the UN, and discuss the terms of this resolution, until even within the pandemic and we understand that, in fact, this resolution with the standards of more rigorous for healthy food would be very important. It would be an instrument that the managers and nutritionists would have in hand to be able to guarantee not only the access to food of a group of the population that was without access, but the access guaranteeing healthy food. So, there are 75% of, for example, fresh food, an obligation, products that are completely forbidden, such as refrigerants, sugar, a type of product completely forbidden in preschools for children up to three years, for example. This resolution was built with the basis, among other documents, in the Brazilian food guide, which is a Ministry of Health document with which the Ministry of Education has an integration, a very large partnership, and this guide of the Brazilian food population, it establishes the guidelines for healthy food. And the school food program, it follows this guide as much as possible. So, we managed, for example, even putting in very rigorous standards that the industry itself adapts to the standards of the school food program. We received the private sector, we talked, we talked with the industry, and large corporations within Brazil have proposed to reduce levels of sugar, of sodium, to be able to continue selling, within the permissible percentage, out of the family agriculture, naturally, to the state, to schools. So, public policy still has a force, depending on the strategy, of a change in the private sector itself, in the industry, depending on how this is done, with a lot of sensibilization, a lot of conversation, anyway. So, we have examples of some standards that apparently were very difficult to be fulfilled, for example, if the most healthy food is offered, a student refuses, for example, because he is used to eating a food with an index of sugar, larger ones, at home or on the street. And we managed to solve these problems, these challenges, with a great tool, which are the actions of food, and nutritional education. These activities of nutritional food education are very thought out within the context of the community itself, the students are inserted in these activities, so that they actually change their habits, and change the habits of the families. An example of this is an activity of nutritional and nutritional education, in an indigenous school, for example, which motivated the students, indigenous children, to talk to their grandparents, and remember what kind of preparation their grandparents used to eat when they were children, and that they no longer existed. And the children learned to do those traditional preparations of the culture of their grandparents, of their ancestors, and then they took these preparations home for their grandparents to experience. And there was, naturally, a whole ludic, mythical, affective process that brought the culture and tradition of that population back to school, back home. And it was an example of an activity of nutritional and nutritional education that transformed the children's nutritional habits, for example, of students. They needed to like their own food. So, nutritional and nutritional education is just to complement and, in Brazil, one of the main... While Dr. Dier connects. Hello. Okay, thank you. Thank you Bruno. We'll pass the floor to Robert. Robert, thank you for the floor. Hi, good afternoon. Thank you. Thanks if I can have my presentation in the first slide. Next slide, please. I've been asked to talk a little bit about the history of nutritional standards in the UK and how we've got to where we are right now. I think the first thing to say is that all education policy in the UK is devolved. So, there are different policies in place in the all four countries of the UK. But despite that, I think it's important to say that a pretty similar story could be told about all four countries. I'm going to focus on England for the sake of time, but really all four countries have school nutritional standards in place being enforced. They've been updated at least within the last 15 years, which is more recently. In 2019, both England and Northern Ireland held discussions or a consultation in the Northern Irish case about updating their standards. That's been held up by the pandemic, but I think we can expect it to resume once hopefully things are back to a more stable situation. Next slide, please. So, to give you a bit of history, school nutritional standards in England are pretty longstanding. We were introduced during the 1940s at the end of the Second World War, and we've had them almost all the time since. There was a period in the 1980s and 1990s, and then the then conservative government where standards were withdrawn. This was part of a quite wide programme of deregulation on behalf of that government. But when that government left office in 1997, the Labour government that came in reintroduced standards quite soon in 2001, and we've had standards in place ever since, and being quite regularly reformed. During the early 2000s, there was quite a lot of concern in the UK about rising obesity levels, particularly amongst children, and that while schools were providing healthy options for children, they weren't being taken up. So, the standards were reformed again towards 2009 to sort of try and combat poor student choices really in their food. Next slide, please. So, since 2010, despite further political changes, the story has really continued with standards being revised and enforced with a school food plan in 2013, which decided to give quite a comprehensive set of resources to schools to support them in providing healthy food. Revised standards again in 2015 and, as I said, further discussion in 2019 of reviewing those standards. This is seen as quite an urgent issue. We know that in England, around a third of children are either overweight or obese by the age of 11, and healthy school food is seen as a really useful way of combating that. During the pandemic, however, talk of reform has been point and hold, and really the priority has been about upholding the standards. Next slide, please. To give you an idea of what the standards require, I think we've heard similar in previous talks. This is a long way from the full picture, but there's quite an emphasis on making sure that food and healthy food is available all across schools, that there are certain amounts of meat or poultry or vegetarian equivalents that are available to students, say, three days a week, and there are real limits on less healthy food. Sometimes that's outright prohibitions, where there's no table salt served to school pupils, and sometimes it's just restrictions. So deep-fried food might be served two days a week or an option two days a week, but no more. So that's the type of approach that is taken. Next slide, please. I think it's important to say this is really part of a really wide program to support pupils and shape the way children eat in schools in England. There are widely available free school meals for less affluent pupils. I think around a fifth of pupils in England receive those free meals. There are also breakfast clubs in some areas, which have been found to improve children's concentration, the behavior and likelihood to attend school. And there's now a national program in place to provide school meals during the holidays. This is something that's been a real point of controversy and focus in the UK during the pandemic, but really for a long time, people have worried that when children aren't in school, particularly during the long summer holiday, they don't have nutritional, some children don't have nutritional food available to them. And there's been a series of pilot schemes to introduce a program to try and address this, and that now has been rolled out nationwide. There is also something called the voluntary schools health rating scheme, which is kind of an accreditation. It's not compulsory, but schools can sign up to it, achieve that rating and that's sort of an advert that they are a school that provides nutritional food for the children who attend. Next slide, please. Okay, fingers are up to date during the pandemic. Again, we heard earlier, a lot of schools in England have been closed to people for quite significant periods. I've highlighted there the two main lockdown periods we've had in England, but even outside of those periods, I think it's important to say that we've had a lot of school absences, children out of school for different reasons, either because they've had COVID themselves or been in contact with people who have, or if a certain number of pupils in a school year have COVID, then all the children will be sent home. So there really has been a lot of school absences, as in most countries I'm sure, during the pandemic. During the pandemic, schools have been expected to still provide meals to less affluent pupils. This has been done in two main ways. One is a voucher scheme. So that's vouchers that parents can spend in supermarkets, or to the value of about 15 pounds a week, to the value of the food they would normally be receiving in school, or food packages that have been provided directly from schools and delivered to parents' houses or through some scheme that the school arranges has been arranged locally. Next slide, please. Okay, so there have been quite a lot of problems, as you can imagine that schools have faced during the pandemic in setting up these schemes, because of the ways that in particular the lockdown periods happened. Things had to be done very quickly. There are a lot of teething problems in the introduction of how things were done. For instance, the vouchers maybe wouldn't work, or they could only be used in certain supermarkets and things that had to be done quite quickly and then fixed quite quickly. There was a lot of concern, particularly in early 2021, about the quality of school food parcels being sent home to pupils. This was a big social media controversy, people posting pictures of what they received and were not happy with. And that very quickly became a matter for the government to address. And I think particularly at the start of the pandemic, there was real concern about the implications for parents who might lose their jobs, and that led to real pressure for school meals to be provided during the school holidays, which for the most part, mostly through the voucher scheme, they have been. That's quite an innovation. In England, that's not something that happened before 2020, but most of the school holidays that have taken place has been some form of scheme to support pupils during the holidays. But perhaps the biggest challenge in terms of enforcing the standards is that through the voucher scheme, the nutritional standards simply aren't enforceable. Parents, the government can't decide what parents buy. When they go to the supermarkets to buy food, the government said they're a useful guide, but really there's not been a way to enforce those standards when children are out of school in anything like the way that would happen if children were in school. Next slide, please. Thank you. And to bring up to a close, I think it's important to say there's really widespread agreement now in the UK about the need for nutritional standards in schools for different countries of the UK, very different governments, but they all agree on this. No policies universal, but this is pretty close to it. I think probably the two main areas of contention going forward are how do we provide healthy meals to children most in need, particularly during the school holidays and particularly when they're out of school? And a huge point of contention in England is who should receive free school meals, whether all children receive free school meals, whether children should receive breakfast, whether we're catching the right pupils with the measures we have. That's a big point of contention. Just quickly move on to my last slide. There's some documents that if you're interested in more of this, what's open about, then you can use those and give you a lot more information about the things I've touched on. Thank you. Merci, Robert. Nous allons passer... Merci, Robert. Nous allons passer à la... Merci, Robert. Nous allons passer à la dernière intervenante. Merci, Melissa. Thank you very much. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me well? Oui. Okay, thank you. Well, these technology issues. Okay, so as I was saying, and thank you very much, Robert, for your presentation, I think it was quite helpful to have it. Now we were talking about the types of data that should go, that will feed into the methodology. And so we have also, since a lot of countries are moving in the direction of supporting their school meal programs and their school food to be more environmentally sustainable, we will also consider data on greenhouse gas emissions, where available, definitely, biodiversity data and other types of environmental indicators, definitely prices. As I mentioned, modeling data. Food supply data and education data. So all of these types of information and data will go into feeding to the methodology. We don't need, we know that the majority of countries do not have all of these comprehensive data, but the idea is that we offer solutions in the methodology and simpler steps or more comprehensive steps, depending on the type of data. Okay, apart from this, we're also going to have key information in order to support the stakeholders who will do the different decisions along the way. For example, we will have information that are not normally considered at this step, like socio-cultural norms related to food, what are the prohibitions, cultural traditions, religion, all of these that could really affect the acceptability of the standards. Of course, the program objectives, the targets and modalities, sometimes the projects do not have as the first objective to improve nutrition. So we definitely need to consider what are the aims of the programs. Of course, production and procurement possibilities and challenges, this is something important that is not often considered at this type of discussions. Environmental, social and economic sustainability considerations, apart from the environment, what are the most vulnerable, do we need to have different standards for those that are most vulnerable socioeconomically? What are the impacts of this? For example, a universal program. Competitive foods, as Catherine was mentioning, there are sometimes in country standards that define what type of foods are allowed to be sold and other types of standards which are defining what the meals that are provided to children should comply with. Sometimes there is a lot of incoherence between these standards. Definitely if the country has national food-based dietary guidelines that can guide the type of food groups, for example, or the types of broader recommendations that should inform these standards. What are the main issues that we aim, that the methodologies should aim to address or at least account for? Factors that may affect the regular provision of food-based dietary standards. What are the impacts of different types of other crises? What are, if the operationalization of the nutrition guidelines and standards are not feasible because of the current procurement mechanisms? As I mentioned, the nutrition guidelines and standards are not flexible or responsive enough to rapid changes like the ones we are experiencing now. Regional differences, we cannot have very, very specific, but we can also ensure that we account for regional differences in, of course, the nutrition priorities of children but also in what the food system can supply. The context of implementation, if it's going to be, who is going to translate these standards into menus and meals? Is it going to be nutritionist, other professionals? Is it going to be the caterers themselves? I will skip this in the interest of time. So important considerations that we are going to take as we embark in this process. The supply and the procurement possibilities must be considered from the beginning of the process to set nutritionist standards and not only afterwards as a mean of implementation. And then a balance needs to be reached between what is needed from a nutrition point of view and the production. Current or new procurement mechanisms, we need to understand, we cannot, definitely we want to ensure that the nutritionist standards are the ones that get complied with and are perfectly acceptable and adequate for children, but sometimes we understand that we need to have a gradual approach because we cannot comply with them with the current procurement and supply possibilities. So we need to understand that the nutritionist standards are not just about nutrient standards or food groups, there also can go into the number of meals to be provided, the timing of the meals, food preparation practices, the variation of menus in time, how it's going to be operationalized, how complex or simple they are, and then the linkages with other standards. And then definitely we have implications of the nutritionist standards. Once they are set, we have implications on the capacity, of course, that this needs to be also considered beforehand on the cost, on food safety if we're introducing, for example, animal source foods, meal planning preparation and distribution on the infrastructure and equipment. So we are aiming that all of this is considered during the whole process and it's an iterative process and definitely monitoring and evaluation including all of this. And just to close, I want you to keep in mind for this presentation is the existence, as Nancy mentioned, of standards by themselves is not enough, but it's a strong basis to improve children's diets. And the success of those standards depend, of course, on actual implementation and complementary measures but also on the richness of the process because it can really spark a lot of insights that are more compliant with, to involve children and parents to enhance acceptability and also to enhance the legal recognition. So I thank you very much. Merci, merci Melissa. Maintenant on va passer à la dernière présentation. Christina, vous avez la parole. Hi everyone. Thanks for having me. And thanks for listening for so long. So I'll try to be vibrant when I talk. So today I'm going to be talking about youth and our relation to food, because I think within the school meal space and the wider food campaigning space. Adults are often guilty of talking so much about young people and children and not actually including them in the conversation. So next slide please. A little bit about my story. I grew up in a food desert. I lived in London and I had no idea about it. I grew up for 15 years without knowing what a food desert was, what it meant that I was living in an environment where I had no access to nutritious food and it was only when I joined the organization that I'm with now by back 2030 that I actually understood the issue and I understood that I'm twice as likely to develop obesity. I'm likely to die around 10 years earlier just because of the food that is available to me. And with the free school meal campaign in the UK, I started it during the eighth week of lockdown, because I was a recipient of free school meals when I was younger and so when I found out that the government wasn't deciding to ensure free school meal provisions over the half-time, over the holidays in the UK, I was shocked. It was a global pandemic. Families had no money coming in. There was no way of making income and yet you're going to take away the one essential provision that allows for a child to eat. So yeah, I started the petition to change that and get the government to make a U-turn. It had 400,000 signatures and we essentially achieved the provision over the May half-term and then Marcus Rashford took on the campaign over the summer holidays to ensure free school meals over the holidays. And I also mentioned that I'm from to Greater Ethiopia because my passion for food also stems from the fact that where I'm from, there's many famines. There's always been agricultural issues and problems for so many different reasons and so the value of food is very important to me personally. Next slide please. So I mentioned by back 2030 where a youth-led movement aiming to fight the injustices of the food industry and we've set the date 2030 because we want to half child obesity by that year. We have one national youth board who's in this year and we've added on six new members so we're now around 15 young people and we've got two regional youth boards, one based in London and one based in Birmingham and we're hoping to expand into different regions of the UK in the next year or so. And I think the work that we do is so important because there is no other youth-led movement like bite back within the food space. I myself was the first person to talk about free school meals and actually try and get rid of the kind of stigma that's around the issue in the UK and that's shocking because free school meals has been an issue for the shame around it and the lack of consistency in nutrition and just the provision itself has been such an issue and yet young people are just not involved in the conversation and they don't feel good about it so I think our work is so crucial and our young people are so amazing. Our values which we all discussed as a group together in our training sessions we decided to use five words were real, resilient, respectful, fresh and energetic and that's what we want to bring to every meeting we're in and that's what we hope to convey in what we demand of our students. We're a perfect example of how to get youth engaged in food. Next slide please. I want to run through some of our campaigns. The ones here are specifically to do with free school meals although we span so many different topics to do with food so there's sport sponsorship for example when I was a kid he went to the English cricket board because there was a campaign called the hundred recently sports cricket tournament called the hundred where the athletes their t-shirts were just crisp packets and it was so shocking to us like they're just crisp packets and they're playing sports and we know that those athletes themselves would never eat the food before advertising that food and nutrition is beyond just a plate. It's everywhere right the fact that we are bombarded by junk food and the fact that obesity childhood obesity has become a thing now it wasn't 50 years ago it's a new issue it's because it's not just about what we're eating it's about how it's being advertised all around us so we've had a junk food marketing campaign we've had success in that in getting the government to introduce a 9pm water shed on TV and get them to ban online advertising by 2023 and the ones here related to free school meals we have our school food champions project where 480 pupils across the country this just started up so we're starting small are taking part in school food clubs where they talk about the food they eat at school and take action to make it healthier and we've also had a don't hide what's inside campaign which is more corporate facing so though we get you know advertised to you with all these massive companies some of them act like they're healthy you know they use halo advertising which essentially means that they make something look for example naked or innocent or something to make it look healthy when actually it isn't about getting young people and everyone and the public the general public to understand that this isn't just about you know what we're eating here it's about our walk to school what do we get advertised to what's on my street that says to me this burger is better than the healthy food that I'm supposed to be eating at school what is it about this you know cereal packet that why is there cartoons on it and getting young people to really question and understand this is more than just you know having chicken and chips it's actually a whole system that's in place to make me not eat healthy and getting young people to change that as well and I really really think young people are the centre of this because if you don't get young people to campaign on this by themselves no matter how much you know you get adults involved and adults to push stuff if the young people don't understand and don't feel involved there's there's no point doing it because they're just going to reject the change that's what our campaigns are about. Next slide please. So the framework around food that picture over there of the young person drinking a fizzy drink I got from a the first thing I typed up when I when I searched up food and young people it was one of the in the in the article it was one of the pictures and it shows to me that still today the narrative is that young people's fault that they eat unhealthily and that it's young people it's the individuals fault that they have bad nutrition and that they're twice as likely to develop obesity and blah blah blah it's it's their fault when it isn't we all know here that it's a systemic problem and so I think really when we're talking about food and we're talking about nutrition we need to ensure that we're using the framework to insinuate that it's a systemic problem instead of an individual one because as soon as you put blame on a young person they immediately reject the conversation and I know you all know that it's not enough for a child to be fed nutritional inequality must be addressed but it has to be addressed in mainstream conversations so when the free school meal problem arise in mainstream media it was on the BBC it was on ITV but there was no conversation around nutrition it was all about there's child hunger in the UK which is obviously correct but if the child that is hungry is being fed poor quality food they are still at a disadvantage and they are still you know completely it's still wrong and so I think even in mainstream conversation when we get interviewed by the media when we get we need to emphasise nutrition because then you know people can get away with doing the bare minimum and the children deserve more and they deserve the most nutrition they can get no matter who their parents are what socioeconomic background they come from so I've said this before young people are only just starting to be included in these conversations you have to start talking with us include us in in these meetings include us in the decision making I think that if this doesn't happen and if young people's voices are neglected there's no way we can move forward because at the end of the day when it's our turn to be the policymakers and be we're not going to be healthy enough to do all that or we're not going to have the understanding or whatever so I think it is so so so essential to include young people and our insight as well I think if it wasn't for myself or Marcus Rashford or whoever this wouldn't be a topic young people at the forefront of talking about their experiences is so so so important and the information gaps and I put in brackets J.O. syndrome which which counts for Jamie Oliver syndrome Jamie Oliver is the co-founder of Biteback 2030 and for those in the UK they will know that he did a campaign 15 years ago to ensure healthy foods in schools in schools and so he got rid of turkey twizzlers he got rid of burgers he got rid of all these unhealthy foods and young people hated him they still to this day like whenever they you know hear about what I'm doing they're like why you know why do you like what Jamie Oliver is doing because no one was talking to the young people about what was going on and again I'm just reiterating the same point but because they weren't brought along on this journey I think I'm probably the only person under 20 that's a teenager in this school there needs to be more of me here because if we don't understand what's going on we're just going to hate the outcome and so we need to go on the journey to understand why nutrition is good for us it's not taught in schools when we do get lunch at break time or at lunch time it's just a plate of food there's no journey of the food we're not taught about it and so I think yeah the information that has to be solved and yes be mindful of young people's experiences I went to a girls school and one of the biggest issues in my opinion is the issue of eating disorders and how to talk about it young people go through so much you know it's a period of time where we're all growing and battling with so many different things and so if we're not talking about the opposite end of the spectrum you know what are we not eating why are we not eating it and if we're not being considerate about that it's going to be really really difficult to communicate with young people we're still trying to understand this and still talking to our young people trying to understand the framework around this conversation but we need to address the things that we tend to not address when we're talking about nutrition a lot of girls specifically don't want to eat and I think if we're trying to ensure the health of every young person we need to include these issues as well when we talk about nutrition so I think the next slide is just thank you for listening and I'm really sorry I can't be in the panel conversation I have to drop off but if you do have any questions please do just find me on Twitter or I'm sure Dario will give my email so yeah thank you thank you thank you thank you Christina thank you to all the panelists we have a term of our presentation thank you to all the panelists we'll go to the round table and have some questions if you please if you want to and the first question will be addressed to Christina and Catherine what concrete examples can you share what are the most effective mechanisms in the process of improving the nutritional quality of school meals what are the most effective mechanisms Christina and Catherine Christina go ahead Christina had to leave okay thank you so I mean if others want to say something Carmen you can turn your video on if you want to add just go ahead I think from our perspective it's definitely important to involve youth and we heard the very inspiring presentation just now from Christina I think it's important that youth are part of the journey because one of the things we also saw in the review of contextual factors is that in the qualitative research youth are not always supportive of nutrition standards and the focus of the session is also on nutrition guidelines and standards because kids they have developed taste preferences that are not necessarily conducive to healthy foods because of the way foods are marketed because of their a natural drive to salt sweet fatty foods etc so we need to involve them from the beginning and of course parents play an important role because the food preferences taste preferences start at a very young age so I think Christina's point that she made that youth need to be involved from the beginning are critical and of course an involvement of the entire school community to make sure we all work together towards the goal of healthier school meals and to bring the community together to engage in the school food environment Christina I don't go on the call so if anyone any other speaker would like to intervene please go ahead maybe Carmen go ahead please no I was just saying there's a couple more questions I think we had thought here for this session so happy to jump in later I'm just going to start by saying and also Christina just said it herself it's basically it's not how we normally as the designers as experts would like to be involved we really need to start thinking differently and we need to for example in this project that I presented we are having different ways of involving youth through their own means and where they are we have had different ways a contest for example for videos where they can really let us know what they like they don't like and what they will actually want to change in their food environments one of the main things that came out from this is the interest on environmental sustainability so food is heavily tied to environmental sustainability so we need to understand this context and not try to reach out to let's say the young people that are most that are easier to reach out to we really need to make an effort to go through the most vulnerable to hear and to co-create with them so I am attaching in the chat a new model that we have for food education in schools that was also created but with different UN agencies and there you can see how in every step of the way designing a proper food education curriculum for the whole school involves the active participation of the students thank you Thank you Thank you Cristina and Catherine for your response The second question will be for Robert and Bruno Robert and Bruno What have been the main challenges to support and maintain the nutrition of meals and school meals during the school year? Thank you for answering this question Robert and Bruno Shall I come in first? Sure I think there are a few things the first thing I would say in England probably a lot of other cases is that school closures happened very quickly certainly in March 2020 and even in January 2021 and so systems that didn't exist had to be had to be conjured fairly quickly to ensure that children were getting support and school meals at all let alone making sure that the sort of nutritional standards you would expect in schools were maintained and I touched on this in my talk but with the main system that has been used in England parents have been given vouchers to go and spend in schools now there are to go and spend in supermarkets now there are some restrictions on what parents can spend that money on but there are things like no alcohol there isn't really much more detail and I think it will be quite hard to enforce particularly at speed and so then you're putting the burden on parents to do the job of schools in trying to ensure that the food is nutritious now a lot of parents can do that but obviously a lot of parents are in difficult situations financially with work and any number of other things the pressures that people have been under over the last two years and so in that environment it's extremely difficult to try and ensure that any sort of nutritional standards are maintained that's been very difficult and that goes equally I think in the case of food packages that have been sent home and that's been done quite quickly but we did see in January 21 a very quickly announced lockdown that what was being sent home to children for about one day they were in school and then suddenly everyone was sent home often wasn't very adequate it was a big campaigning point on social media it was something that Marcus Rashford who Christina mentioned earlier really championed and brought into the public domain and it was addressed hopefully quicker it might have been otherwise but I would say this is all part of working at speed problems in staff and supply chains during the pandemic have certainly affected school food and the aim in particular not just of getting food to children but nutritionally valuable food to children so I think those are the main challenges we've seen in the UK and in England in particular thank you thank you Robert Bruno you can bring an answer ok thank you well to explain a little the challenges that Brazil faced we need to remember that with the pandemic there was a basic problem that was the problem of access to food this is the main problem and we needed to solve a problem of access and we needed to give access to healthy food what guarantees a healthy food in Brazil the first aspect is family farming and the purchase of family farmers was more difficult all the procedures had to be updated for an emergency period so the purchase of the freshest and healthiest food of family farmers so it was necessary to take this purchase the other problem the other aspect of healthy food is the following of a nutritionist from the beginning to the end of the process from the resource that the local government takes to be able to make the purchases of family farmers or traditional markets to guarantee that the food that is arriving to the student even if it is in the residence as it happens during the pandemic in your house is a healthy food and the nutritionist's work was also a work committed during the pandemic there was a need to process training training with the nutritionists so that their work was not interrupted the nutritionists were even the student's house and from there the third aspect is that school food has these healthy patterns of nutrition in Brazil are the activities of food and nutrition education that naturally happen within the school so it was a third aspect that needed to be adapted we planned the activities of food and nutrition that could be done within the students' houses by their own parents one of the examples is the school garden that was developed in the Brazilian schools and that was taken within the houses of some students with the orientation of nutritionists some family farmers who together with parents and mothers of these students were able to work some actions of food and nutrition within the student's house within the student's house with some adaptations so it was basically the problem of access to food the problem of the continuity of the purchase of family farmers and the continuity of the activities of food and nutrition education and nutrition thank you thank you Bruno we will go to the last question that will be addressed to Catherine to Carmen what are the most effective ways to implement in a significant way agriculture supply and the other actors of food in the elaboration of nutritional norms feasible for school students Catherine and Carmen if you can answer this question thank you let me start I think all of the topics overlap and what we have been discussing in the sense that we need a broad participation of several actors in the development of nutrition standards and what is acceptable and feasible at the local level at the school level it's a huge discussion led by Christina and others on youth but there's other constituencies so I hope this question is really important on how do we bring food stakeholders the producers of food the ones that are processing food and others into this conversation I think Melissa earlier mentioned that we need to take that into consideration for standards to be feasible it needs to encompass what is being produced locally what is available locally to be able to first be cost effective but also the real important opportunity to incorporate more nutritious food in the standards and also in what children end up getting in general so there are specific opportunities I would say for this to happen in WFP's experience but I think we've all felt it in one way or another the issue of incorporating school management committees parent-teacher associations and other groups women's groups and civil society organizations we already heard from the side of youth and the students themselves but when it comes to others the school provides a really important environment where we already have these groups that are constituted that form really important constituencies that have to be consulted as I mentioned communities as a whole really also need to be part of this discussion we know that when communities are involved many of the farmers maybe many of the associations and people that are producing the food are also the parents of the children that go to those same schools so they not only have a stake in terms of their own livelihood but also because this is what their children will end up eating and the connection there that we need to make and be really mindful of how can we consistently involve communities, parents and the different stakeholders around the school level over Thank you Carmen? I'll just keep it very short because maybe we can go to a question on agriculture still and school food production which was raised in the chat and working with the range of stakeholders is critical but also because we are working towards addressing all forms of malnutrition we must constantly also consider mechanisms to safeguard public interest and public health and to make sure that we have mechanisms in place to address conflicts of interest because we need to make sure that the food provided is safe and healthy so that's a tricky point but I'll leave it at that maybe we can go to the question on agriculture Thank you Thank you all Thank you to all the panelists We are now at Carmen of our panel I want to thank all the speakers We have a very nice presentation I'm sorry to interrupt you I think we have a point that was raised in the chat that maybe we have some few minutes left to address If you allow me I will go ahead and pose in it because it was quite an interesting one and I think my participant named Robert underlined the potential that schools have to sustainably produce hiding institutions food and this activity this fact also provides an extra and active and engaging educational activity and he then highlighted that schools themselves can produce and should be determining and productive elements of DIY solutions so maybe our colleagues both at FAU and maybe also WFP want to address this question over Yes, thank you and thank you colleagues In that term we only have two hours so we needed to focus on one of the topics as mentioned beforehand I think all organizations are working within a broader systemic approach in this case for example we are placing the school at the center and calling it the school food system because it has all the aspects of the food environment that supply production, procurement parents, children the school system we use for example the use of school gardens in different ways we try not to promote school gardens as the only potential supply opportunities because we know that this really depends on the management of the gardens it should not be on the responsibility of for example the school staff it should not be additional responsibility for them or even on the children it needs to be sustainably managed and it needs to have resources because otherwise it becomes an activity that is very difficult to maintain and it can also impede other aspects of learning so we promote the use of school gardens definitely as live learning platforms and then there are some instances where particularly where the school garden it has productive capacity it's managed by local farmers local stakeholders and it's really a well rounded let's say commitment and activity but we know that this unfortunately cannot be the case in all schools not all schools have space or the conditions necessary to do that we try to promote where feasible and if not adapt for example urban gardens for teaching purposes the linkage of course to local smallholder farmers but we need to have this it's a contextual situation like always but we really try to ensure that everything that we do in schools is really linked to a systemic aspect considering thank you okay thank you then maybe if there's no other comments maybe I can give the floor back to Dr. Dia those in remarks thank you thank you all thank you all we heard today talking about the advantages and lessons learned in projects and interventions that aim to better balance between the needs of the children and a quality school food that is now in action our children deserve not only a quality education but also nutritious tasty and produced in a more sustainable way we must hear the voice of the youth they are strong, clear and they claim a viable future the school food system is an essential element of this future a school food that is sufficient in quality but that favors better health results in the environment and the social and economic situations I would like to all of you to play a role in the promotion of this change be it as a researcher to continue to cement the proof of the role of nutritional norms in schools to help fight against the forms of malnutrition or as a participant to find programmatic means programmatic and to create and put them in a real and specific way as a counselor to prepare and present a proven way to what it is to be translated by a realistic and regular allocation of funds as an educator to use school education as a platform of learning or as a defender of this approach to work without relax to demonstrate the course of not acting and the ultimate advantage of a holistic and systemic approach to optimize school food I thank you