 Ambassadors, distinguished delegates, thank you very much for giving me the floor. My full statement is to want to read. This is why I'll be giving you the bridged version. In addition to my statement, my colleagues, Andrew Ferranda, Esal Varys and Ramona will speak during the site events on digitalization, sustainable food and nutrition, and the decade for family farms and youth. As a representative of civil society, I'm speaking on behalf of Ne-Le-Ne-European Central Asia Food Sovereignty Network. This network brings together all of its CSO constituencies, small-scale farmers, pastoralists, small-scale and artisanal fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, migrants and agricultural workers, consumers, NGOs, as well as rural women and youth in our region. Let me start with the woman's perspective. I'm speaking on behalf of women farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, consumers and NGOs. We are the driving force of the Ne-Le-Ne Network in the region. We have built the food systems that fed our region in the past, continue to feed us today and will feed us tomorrow. We are the heart of the food and farming systems. We are vital to our collective survival. Women have been fighting patriarchy and destructive political, social and economic systems through their collective struggle for food sovereignty and feminism, and building resilient agricultural systems based on agro-ecological farming practices that not only improve food production, but also work in harmony with nature. We are the backbone of any sustainable food system through seed-saving and agro-biodiversity to allow for pollinators to do their job. Our practice provides solutions. We invest in agro-ecology. In this circular economy based on solidarity and feminism, we reaffirm that this is essential to rebuild and shape our future and our claim of rights. We generate local knowledge. We build and shape social justice, promote our respective varied identities and cultures. We strengthen the vision of a new society founded on gender relations underpinned by dignity, justice, equality and equity. Despite our vital role and that we have been sharing and transmitting our knowledge for centuries, we still face discrimination, violence and exploitation for profit. Still, we are denied equal education opportunities. Our economic, social, legal, political rights are not fully recognized. And public policies fail to guarantee our equal social and economic participation. Our rights of access to land, support services, financial and economic resources and legal recognitions are minimal. In spite of this, we represent the majority of food producers and continue to do unpaid, essential food related work such as processing, preparing, storing, food and seed saving. We young women are losing our lands, our territories, our natural resources as well as our work. This is the result of displacement and forced migration exacerbated by a large and deepening crisis. First and foremost, COVID-19. The pandemic is aggravating pre-existing inequalities, exposing vulnerabilities in social, political and economic systems. We have been hit particularly hard because we have already earned less, we suffer from job insecurity and often live close to or below the poverty line. We are the ones who do unpaid work in the home and this workload has increased during the pandemic. We are the ones who are facing gender-based violence which has also increased during the pandemic. And finally, we are the ones who have not been included and recognized in most of the COVID-19 response planning and decision making. The COVID-19 pandemic has in fact deepened existing economic inequalities and social injustice. It has pushed and continues to push many rural and urban people in a region to severe financial insecurity. Daily waged workers, both migrant workers in the field and in food chain processing units often have no social protection when they fall ill and it goes for Western Europe and other countries in the region. The ILO has clearly pointed out that there are increased violations of workers' rights with a particular focus on migrant and agri-food workers. This is echoed by the erosion of human right to adequate food and many other rights in many countries of the region. Restrictions imposed to respond to the pandemic have affected and continue to affect the livelihoods of many small-scale food producers, farmers, fishers and pastoralists. In addition to those public health issues there has been an increase in political violence and instability. People's resistance is increasingly straying outside the law, including leading to war. We condemn war and call on all states of our region to contribute to peace-building based on social justice. War is destructive. Instability and oppression are particularly brutal for agriculture. This obviously affects food production and supply chains and presents particular risks to small-scale food producers in affected areas as well as to the urban poor. Food security is linked to peace and food sovereignty to people's rights to determine their own food systems and their right to adequate and culturally appropriate food and nutrition. This should be our priority. Lack of support for the elderly and persons with disabilities is also an increasing problem across the region. Clearly we need to democratize our societies and ensure full participation of youth in political and decision-making processes. We must ensure that throughout society youth is able to develop leadership skills. Our region needs comprehensive policies for the integration of youth in rural areas by broadening access to land, creating direct employment, ensuring access to local territorial markets, housing, food production, which offers full rights, overland, which recognizes the legal rights of Indigenous peoples, peasants and other people working in rural areas. This includes the right to life and adequate living standards, the right to land and territory, the right to seeds, inputs, markets, information, justice and gender equality. We need the decade of family farming and the decade of nutrition to be considered as a unique opportunity for policy coherence and governmental commitment based on human rights obligations. These two initiatives must be more than a mere formality. These two decades must be considered as a real opportunity for ensuring that policies and public investment benefit and support small-scale producers and family farms in all rural and urban communities across the region. Food bank demand has risen by 40%. School closures last spring meant that many children have been deprived of their school meals, often the only healthy meal they got each day. There have been and continue to be massive job losses due to the resulting economic crisis, this leading to homelessness and an ability to buy healthy food. This lack of healthy food in turn weakens immune systems and increases the risk of developing underlying health conditions, which in turn means that people are less resilient to COVID-19. The major underlying conditions that make people vulnerable to COVID-19 are industrial food-related non-communicable diseases such as heart conditions, diabetes, as well as malnutrition, obesity, and under nutrition, as well as mineral and vitamin deficiencies. Putting trade and international markets above local markets and small producers remains an aggravating factor. Several studies by the FAO and the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples' Mechanism have clearly shown that shorter food chains and territorial food systems have proven to be more resilient. We clearly believe that we need to promote all aspects of agro-ecology as part of the COVID-19 response mounted by the UN institutions and states as well as local governments. We need to integrate our COVID-19 response into the food systems and nutrition discussion, something we have never done before. This is why it is so important to give greater support to the local food system innovation and facilitate the networking at the regional level in order to overcome the multiple environmental, social, and economic crises we're facing. For the purpose of surmounting these challenges, we need a drastic paradigm shift from a trade-based to a rights-based approach to food and agricultural policies. The trade approach has failed us many times over at different levels. This is why the dissemination and the implementation of both the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples at the regional, national, and local level is crucial. Moreover, digitalization is imminent. However, it does not warrant such a warm welcome. We need to draw more attention to the question of ownership of producers and indigenous peoples' data as it is currently being grabbed from them without their prior and informed consent. This practice needs to stop. We need to immediately halt all ongoing data-grabbing from small-holder food producers and implement a strict regulatory framework that will allow them to benefit from digitalization on their own terms. Moreover, these processes need to be community-owned. Now, as for the FAO regional priorities, we commit to contributing to the FAO regional priorities with our knowledge, our practice, our actions, and our efforts. We acknowledge the work done together in the past biennium and request further and deeper involvement of social society organizations in achieving the FAO regional priorities. The hand-in-hand initiative. We view the hand-in-hand initiative with a lot of interest, and we truly expect to be fully involved. We view the idea of partnerships at all level of government in particular local government to be very positive. We believe that community and social enterprises, cooperatives, and other forms of secular economic entities based on solidarity and feminism can be created this way through partnerships to support the implementation of sustainable food systems and nutrition especially at the territorial and local level. On the other hand, we are concerned about the predominant role attributed to the private sector and the lack of coherence with what was foreseen within the UN decade of family farms and in particular with the global and national plants linked to this initiative. Now, with respect to the UN Food Systems Summit, finally, we are extremely concerned about this initiative. There's nothing new in the fact that social movements and organized civil society such as the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty of which we are a member, have constantly denounced the structural inequalities and the industrial food system, which are key factors that have led to the current crisis. Our agenda for change did not begin with the creation of the 2030 agenda. We most often come up against the lack of political will and increased influence of corporate power that are shaping our food systems. At a glance, the aims of the UN Food Systems Summit seem to make sense under the circumstances. However, the genesis of the summit and the ongoing preparation process are indicative of how much corporate power is shaping the path toward the summit and therefore highlights the serious conflict of interest. We're extremely concerned by the extent to which corporate power is shaping the path toward the summit. The Committee on World Food Security and as a consequence the civil society and indigenous people's mechanism, as the foremost international intergovernmental policy, platform and food issues has been undermined of the summit preparation process. At the same time, social movements in organized civil society have been deliberately excluded from the summit preparation process, while organizers are hand-picking individuals to be called champions, heroes and so on. The proposed summit risks undermining the 25 years of work on democratizing international decision making in food and agriculture. It can undermine a model of engagement that fosters and values the critical participation of those who are most affected by food insecurity and malnutrition while being the primary contributors to food security. We believe in solidarity and equality. We believe the only way to achieve the SDGs is a right-based approach. Day in and day out we're charting this course and we call for a radical shift in food and agriculture policies to ones based on food sovereignty and agro-equality. This is why we need to implement the voluntary guidelines on the governance of tenure as well as the international guidelines securing sustainable small-scale fisheries. The UN DROP and the UND RIP at the national and local level based on the state's human rights obligations they should now be promoted and implemented. Thank you.