 Excuse me. Good morning and good afternoon. I am Jada McKenna, the CEO of Mercy Corps, and on behalf of the World Economic Forum, I welcome you to this session on data, digital, and innovation levers, taking place during the Sustainable Development Impact Summit. Together with the World Economic Forum, Mercy Corps has co-chaired the Lever for Change on Innovation for the UN Food Systems Summit, and we are so pleased to host this discussion ahead of the UN Food Systems Summit kicking off later this morning. This session is live-streamed with people tuning in from around the world. Simultaneous interpretation is available in English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and Russian. Welcome to our panelists and participants. The world has an opportunity to dramatically advance the fight against food insecurity and hunger. Today's UN Food Systems Summit will bring together governments, donors, businesses, and members of civil society from around the world in an effort to transform the way the world produces, consumes, and thinks about food. It is critical that we work together with a sense of urgency to find solutions. 2020 marked the sixth year in a row where global hunger and under nutrition were on the rise. My organization, Mercy Corps, works in some of the world's most fragile places, and our global teams witness daily how the converging crises of conflict, climate, and COVID-19 are fueling hunger and food insecurity. But at Mercy Corps, we also witness a world of possibility, seeing how innovation can transform food systems that build food security, resilience, and inclusive development. We know that innovation has the potential to create more productive, efficient, and climate smart markets for healthy and nutritious food, to make systems more inclusive and to help conflict and climate-affected communities weather risk and participate in the food system. We've worked in partnership with the World Economic Forum to lead the Innovation Lever of Change, designed to make innovation a significant enabling factor for food systems transformation. The Innovation Lever identified four main innovation areas and convened experts and organizations in four working groups, which included data and digital, knowledge and technological, society and institutional, and national and regional. With the joint effort of these four groups, the Innovation Lever has identified an action agenda to guide member states and communities to fast-track food system transformation by fostering innovation. Today, we have gathered a distinguished panel representing a diverse community of public, private, and social sector innovation partners to share the role that innovation can play in transforming food systems through country-led action. Our speakers will share their insights on how we can collaborate among stakeholders and use knowledge and technology to build strong food systems that deliver healthy food for everyone, including those who live in the most fragile places. So turning to our panelists, I'd like to welcome Mr. Christian Frutiger, Assistant Director General, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, Switzerland. His Excellency, the Advisory State Minister of Agriculture of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Her Excellents, Maryam Muhammad Said Al-Mahiri, Minister of State for Food Security, the Office of the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates. Mr. Sven Torre-Holster, President and Chief Executive Officer of Yara International based in Norway. And last but certainly not least, Shonda Claim, the Head of the Food Systems Initiative and a member of the Executive Committee of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. So what I'd like, I'd like to kick off the panel asking each speaker in the order that I introduced you to give really brief remarks on two questions. Which innovation pathways offer the greatest potential to unlock and support country-led food systems transformation? And what new types of multi-stakeholder partnerships and social innovations can help realize that potential? Ambassador Frutiger, perhaps I'll start there. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot, Jaydan. Hello to everybody. I'll sort of start with a more general, with a few more general points and then maybe we have in the second round a bit of time to go into some more in-depth examples or at least give some examples to bring this down a little bit to the concrete actions that are that are possible. So yes, we, for the first time, we will hear in today at the Food Systems Summit countries calling for a systems approach to food, to address hunger, health, climate, biodiversity and livelihood and so many other interconnected aspects that encompass food systems. So each country will express different needs and challenges to improve their food systems and they will, and this is really a novel, offer a united message that we must break silos, engage more communities and address these challenges with people, especially the most vulnerable and marginalized, as we co-design the action going forward. So these country food systems pathways have been built on inclusive national food systems dialogues that have made it possible and this is really maybe for the first time to share, listen and understand, to plan together to unleash the power of food to deliver progress on all 17 SDGs and this in our view is the first big innovation and the first big achievement of this process in the run-up to the Food Systems Summit. 147 countries engaged in these national food systems dialogues over 800 such dialogues took place all over the world, engaging more than 50,000 people all together. So that's an overwhelming result in view of the transformation of food systems, not the transition, the transformation towards sustainable food systems. This gives us a strong basic social fabric and the opportunity to understand each other better among the different stakeholders and to build trust. So these multi-stakeholder engagements also mean that we are now accountable to the thousands of people who participated in these dialogues and we are accountable to their ideas, aspirations and expectations. This means that governments and businesses must now take bold steps to change the structural imbalances of power that have distorted and pose problem to food systems over the decades. So the four innovation levers which Jada mentioned in their introduction give a series of good pathways forward and how these bold steps could be addressed, and how some of these big imbalances could be addressed. I will stop here in the interest of time and would then maybe like to come back with a few concrete examples on each of these levers later. Thank you back to you Jada. Thank you, thank you. Her Excellency Alma, Harry, would you like to go next? Thank you so much Jada, thank you so much to everyone being here at this important event and it's really exciting to know that in a few hours our food system summit is here and there to sort of pave the way for our future. And yes, we all have a role to play and the UAE also takes this responsibility very seriously in transforming its food systems. I want to share with the audience as well what the UAE is doing on a national level and also on a global level as well. So since we're discussing what are the innovation pathways, I want to share with everybody what I feel in transforming the systems here and the UAE have been really critical or see that they are really good levers to accelerate our efforts. Number one, it's harnessing the private sector and empowering them. It's really been in a way the private sector are soldiers on the ground. We need to understand their needs. We need to see what barriers are they facing. How can they develop more? How can we ensure that they take sustainable pathways as well? So we did a lot of things like accelerators, accelerators but for the ag tech sector. We did think tanks. We also just recently launched the Food Tech Valley. These are all initiatives that we've done in the country to empower the private sector to grow and develop. As you all know, the UAE is a country that has very harsh climate so we cannot do the traditional open field agriculture but we can harness technology and innovation and be able to sort of grow an ag tech sector. And this is something that excites the youth. Women are really interested in this sector too so we really want to grow this sector. So understanding the needs of the private sector is for us number one. Number two, it's creating strong links between government, academia and the private sector. Again, this is ensuring we're communicating, we're understanding needs. We just hosted last week a workshop between all these parties looking at how treated wastewater could be used as a sustainable water resource for controlled environment agriculture. We know in our climates we need a lot of water for cooling needs but why should we use desalinated water? Why not look at treated wastewater as well? So looking at how treated wastewater could be used. And then third, it's empowering a very exciting news sector which is alternative foods and in particularly alternative proteins. We really feel knowing that moving forward, hoping to have enough food for the nine billion people in future, we really need to look at more sustainable ways of how we can grow and produce our proteins. Therefore we really feel this whole sector of plant-based alternatives, cultured meat, fermentation is an industry that really needs to be looked at and empowered as well. And the UAE is taking steps in this. The Food Tech Valley will also be really looking into empowering this sector. So these are the three pathways that I'd like to share with everyone that I feel are important to accelerate in the decade of action that we're in. That's wonderful and very action packed. His Excellency Boru. Thank you, Her Excellency and the dear all participants. First, I'm very honored to participate in such a very impressive panel which will be dealt on the data and the innovation level. So currently our government through the Ministry of Agriculture and also the ATA, Agriculture Transformation Agency, collaborated to work for food systems, summit innovation level, change to help defining shared innovation principles, supporting the collaboration of actors across the sectors, meaning that from all the agricultural value chains in which we have just currently prepared the food and nutrition strategy, so that this innovation policy brief, which is prepared by this panel under the Convention of Economic Forum, will help us just in the future to transform our food system here in Ethiopia to its highest level. So through this framework, we have just stated the game-changing solutions in which the innovation technology of this data and innovation will help us. The other point here I want to just put here is regarding the data and the digital quality, including our ministry and also ATA, Jobian Agriculture Transformation Agency, the Mercy Corp, Consumers International and also World Economic Forum also produced the future marketplace playbook exploring transparent and exclusive sustainability scale models that enable all actors, meaning that along it is these value chains to from our small farmers to the producers, to the consumers, so that in order to just access and easily transform this all through this process, so that this playbook features the work for our ministry and the doing world ATA and the data hub and also transformative leverage point to drive forward the broader strategy, meaning that with that we have put in the food and the nutrition strategy, so that with this as a government and also as our ministry and also respect sectors, we are very welcome this all technologies which will be just enabling us or leveraging us to just transform our food along its value chains, so that in future with this coalition we are very honored and welcome all stakeholders or both of the government or an government participants to do participate on this all in order to realize our this strategy which have been just stated before, so that thank you very much. This is all our pointers and also back to you. Yeah, thank you, Minister Boru. Ethiopia has been on the path towards transformation for a while, so it's always great to hear about your latest efforts. And Mr. Sven Holster, please. Thank you, Teda and D.R.F.O. panelists. Yarn International is a global crop nutrition company and as a direct response to the Paris Agreement, we decided to change our mission, our vision and our strategy to embed the sustainable development goals, so our mission is to responsibly feed the world and protect the planet and in that is a promise both to help to grow food for a growing population, but also to do it in a sustainable and inclusive way. And I think in this session I'll focus on the inclusivity part of it, because sadly what we've seen in the last year is that the number of people going hungry to bed has increased for the first time in a very long time. A hundred million more people are going hungry to bed now than about a year ago, so an innovation can do something about that. And it's not to me at least only about technology, it's about the distribution of knowledge. And when we make knowledge available to everyone, we start to close the social divide that we have today. And the technologies already exist. The challenge is how do we reach the millions of farmers through user-friendly and real-time data so that they can use and let me be super concrete on this. As a response to the pandemic, we launched something called Africa Connect, where we reached out to farmers and retailers to spread agronomic competence. And in just a matter of months, we were able to get 4,000 retailers on board, 2 million farmers in Tanzania and Kenya, and with this ecosystem where we bring solutions together, we start to see real results already in the first harvest, where we see crop yields multiplying compared to where they were before. And that has a food security impact, but also from a small business point of view, we're making the farmers more profitable. And that game changer is through technology and where we can start to reward small holder farmers with additional income for better practices. And we can build on that with something that we've launched, a go to carbon lines to do carbon farming, to create additional income for the farmers, as well as we both address a climate issue, but also an income issue for the farmers. So for me, technology is a very strong solution to this, but think about it more as an enabler to spread knowledge today with the help of whether it's a smartphone like this or a normal cell phone, you can put in the palm of the small holder farmer knowledge and expertise that in the past would only be available to huge industrial scale farmers. Today, we're reaching 10 million farmers digitally by 2030. We're aiming at the connecting with 100 million farmers. I think I'll keep it there for now. That's wonderful. And those numbers are good examples of aiming for, as Mr, as Ambassador Frutiker said, aiming for transformation and not just transition. As we know, this summit is really just the beginning of an action path that we all will take to move towards transformation. So with that, I just have a few follow up questions to kind of get us all inspired about the actions that you all are taking and to help us think about pragmatic steps we can take ourselves. I'd like to start with you, Her Excellency Almaheri. You've spoken about how the UAE is advancing innovative agricultural technology to deal with your specific climate. And can you share, and while also creating a more inclusive workforce, and I think you mentioned you specifically, can you share how you see the new ideas and practices being formed in the UAE, like can help other arid countries? Sure, sure. Thanks, Jada. And yeah, I totally agree with what Sven says. It's the innovation and technology, but ensuring that so once we know and we have this technology and innovation and expertise, we need to share this. It's our duty to do so. So the UAE being a country that has very low annual rainfall, less than 5% arable land. We really had to look into how we can innovate when looking at what we could grow in the UAE and still be sustainable. So not everything makes sense to grow here in the UAE, but because of technology advancements, there are a lot of food types that we can grow now using closed environment agricultural systems. And really for us, when you look now what you can find locally, we've got all the vegetables you can think of, leafy greens, we've got blueberries, raspberries, quinoa, salmon. These are all foods that just in the last two, three years, you're actually seeing in the market. So also making sure that the people here are aware that this is made locally and this is made sustainably. So so that people now start thinking about where food comes from because we're a country that all the last years have been very much used to importing a lot of food. Everyone was used to having food coming from abroad. But now it's kind of like this mindset change where like, no, actually you can find this locally and try to support your local producers as well. And including also the local farmers and making sure that they also know what technologies they could use, ensuring they have access to financing, access to land, access to insurance. So so we're really going through a transformation and changing the blueprint of the country and looking at what we could produce here sustainably. Just to mention that the UAE has basically a plan, a national plan. We have the UAE national food security strategy. I think it's really important for countries to ensure that they have targets to work towards. They have they have a plan and that all the authorities know the bigger umbrella to to where they're so they know where they're working towards. I think this is really important. And we have that here in the UAE. And this plan is all about transforming our food systems and also taking that knowledge, which we will hopefully then develop or are developing and sharing that with others who also have hot arid climates like we do. So we don't want to just become or we are a hub of food trade, but we want to now become also a hub of knowledge, technology for hot arid climates too. So taking this taking this up and of course, any new technology that you're looking at, there is a there's usually a high cost coming with it. But once you start fine tuning it and looking how you can down or put down the costs and really make it something that's accessible for for all is really important here as well. So yeah, so in a nutshell, what we want to do is we want to look at technology and innovation ensure we're reaching everyone ensure the community is also taking a part in this and is demanding the right foods and looking at foods locally as well. And then, of course, taking that knowledge as well to others who have the same kind of environment that we have. Thank you. I love that creation of a new blueprint and then spreading that and sharing. That's wonderful. Minister Borough, you talked about the work of the data in digital coalition and the market book playbook that emerged for that is very impressive. And we're at Mercy Corps have been really proud to be part of these efforts. Can you talk a little bit more about your vision and ambitions for advancing and scaling data and digital solutions after the summit and particularly ensuring that these solutions enable these transformations to reach the last mile. Thank you, Madam Tajeda. As you know, Ethiopia is currently just expanding her internet penetration to all, especially for these rural areas. Through that, but we started before some, as I told you, ATE data hub, the Agile Transformation Data Hub currently just giving service for small farmers, extension services by using some technologies, just SMS, the short method, and also others. So for future, our ambition with this data coalition, after we expand all this, the internet penetration to all our 80 percent of small farmers in the future, you are highly in need of just also we have just designed the strategy, the Ethiopian digital strategy, in that our country just framed into five thematic areas in which agriculture is one of its, in which we are just the future promoting the digital agriculture economy so that in that we highly need of this data coalition, the digital data, so that for that we have just expanding our infrastructures to services. So, ATE, Agile Transformation and other old international and also local developers could help us, we believe, and also when to just call for them on this special panel in the future, we have the ambition of this transforming our society. So this data revolution, okay. I get some point is very impressive point is from UAE and also other my speakers from YARA and also you and also this is very impressive from the side of this coalition, this data coalition, so that we are very, very welcome and also have revised our new policy in which it is very incited to work with this digital agriculture in the future. So we are very welcome and also Herta, we also presented our this strategy in the room, pre-submit, pre-submit, our Excellency Minister, everyone also presented there and also we have much institutionalizing and forming in the issue of this climate smart market for our food and nutrition. So this to conclude we are very welcome and also because it's your passion to have a well-conduced agroecology and also we have conducive environment and also ample large of large agricultural land use to feed ours and also the globe. Thank you very much. Back to you. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Bohr. Kristen, I know one of the you talked about food system innovation and I know one of the things that SDC has really been a pioneer around the food innovation hubs supporting this ecosystem of food transformation at a country level. What can you talk about to us a little bit about the unique opportunities you see in those for addressing food insecurity and for ensuring innovations really reach those who have been historically excluded from the system? Absolutely, thanks a lot. It's really breaking this down then to the local level and so I'd like to just make four points on the four areas of the of the policy brief. You know on knowledge and technological solutions Switzerland has taken leadership in the food systems pre-summit to launch the coalition on agroecology together with nine other member states you and organizations and farmers associations among others. Agroecology is often you know believed as a bit of an outdated concept but we are really convinced that it's dynamic and innovative and that it can help avoid some of the clashes and dead ends in the current food systems particularly it will help these millions of small holder farmers who are at the basis of the food systems particularly in the global south and the high level panel of experts on food security and nutrition has outlined these 13 principles which clearly point into that direction. Tomorrow SDC will co-organize the launch of a citizen science initiative which reaches out to farmers and food consumers around the world and of all generations to really look at innovative ways of transiting to agroecological food systems. Second institutional innovation addressing some of the financing gaps again at local level. Governments can give the regulatory framework and the policy environment but we also need smart ways of risk sharing with the private sector and we need to find the right mix of blended finance instruments. Here an initiative just as an example in Africa looking at the missing middle so funding financing small and medium-sized enterprises in agricultural transformation so they connect basically small holder farmers to local markets. Huge financing gap there we're looking to raise with 50 million Swiss francs or US dollars in grant funding about 700 million dollars in private funding providing first loss guarantees and technical assistance out of these 50 million and raising the other 700 million. Thirdly more from a hub perspective national regional innovation ecosystems but also looking at cities. Cities are food systems ecosystems in themselves they have a powerful leverage they're also slightly more manageable than national level or regional level level systems and we have been working with cities we're also supporting a nutrition in city ecosystems initiative in Bangladesh Kenya and Rwanda to really approach towards that and last but not least data and digital I'm not going to go into details this is the whole universe but just a pitch in a bit more than two weeks time the UN World Data Forum will be taking place in Switzerland and we'll certainly continue the discussion on food systems and innovation hubs there. Thank you that's wonderful lots of exciting stuff coming on spend Yara's commitment to nature positive production and reaching farmers is and has been impressive for a long time and love to hearing about the data and digital intake that you're pushing can you talk about what continued support you see needed from governments and civil society to reach your goal of 100 million and to continue to spread to spread these innovations. Thanks Karan I'll be super short in interest of time here but if I could have a wish it would be that we could all get together and create a standardized open farm and field data exchange because if we get that in place globally we have something to build on then we can get scale we can incentivize based on that we can measure we can de-risk and through that we will be able to to also simplify the life of farmers because imagine if everyone is trying to do this in his or hers proprietary way to measure how are we then going to be able to help the everyday life of the farmers but if you have a standard in place we would be able to get that done and I'm certainly committed to that from from the other we are working with several players in the in the food system as well to to try to create this neutral system that could be a standalone system but that would enable the collection of data and also to create the incentives so that we could reach 100 million farmers this is doable but let's try to do it as simple as possible. Yes yes yes I I love that it's doable and we can do it with minimal complexity. This has been an illuminating discussion on how innovation can play a role in transforming food systems and particularly critical in understanding how innovation can work in practice to deliver results to help us advance the fight against food insecurity and hunger and and I want to give a tremendous thank you to our panelists and I sincerely hope that everyone watching this has been inspired or thought about other ways that they can move the agenda forward. I want to thank the World Economic Forum and all of you for sharing your vision I will hand it over to Sean DeClaim for closing remarks. Wonderful thank you Jada and it's just lovely to hear the panel and you know the leadership that's coming through from from all of you I think what was clear today was a real focus around people centered innovation and how innovation pardon me is a key accelerator and but also an enabler for food systems transformation and we stress that word transformation but also how it's been critical when you're looking at innovation to adopt a much wider more holistic view of innovation that includes you know local knowledge that brings in you know very strongly the whole local agenda it's a bottom up agenda that looks at institutional and institutional innovation but also of social innovation so I think what we were hearing today was particularly a focus around we we heard really clearly some of the wonderful leadership examples that are coming out from countries who are really looking to build those ecosystems at the at the country level to really focus on those whether it's food valleys or whether it's building out in in UAE or whether it's building on the the wonderful work of the agricultural transformation agency in Ethiopia and Christian talked about the the role of looking at ecosystems but also not just nationally but including cities and so so how you would build out these these food innovation hubs and what what that would mean and I think then also just the how we break the silos we heard about agroecology and regenerative food and you know what that means and you know with the food innovation with the innovation lever it's been interesting to to really focus on we we heard the farmers voice come through very strongly and it was talked about a lot today and the whole creation of a hundred million farmer platform promoting solutions towards net zero nature positive food system transformation and then finally yes we did hear about digital but what we heard was this is not the whole thing and and some really exciting discussions there around the this idea of a digital data coalition that's coming out of the innovation lever and also things like the the marketplace playbook the digital data marketplace playbook and just some of the the great examples that are coming out and some and that was really born out of a conversation between consumers and consume led by consumer international and farmer organizations you know organizations like mercy book or playing such a key role and we've just seen a a terrific lot of examples of where we can really start to look at inclusive use of of data to actually improve food systems to make sure that we're reducing waste that we're we're actually doing this in a much more inclusive way so I hope if you've taken nothing away from this you've taken away a much broader view of innovation than simply one that's just focused on digital or technology but actually this much more inclusive holistic view of innovation so thank you to the panel really exciting to hear all this leadership that's coming through in in UAE and Ethiopia the role that you know countries like switzerland are playing both in their own country but also globally and then you know organizations like mercy call the leadership there and companies like Yarra thank you very much