 Distinguished delegates, participants and dear colleagues, good morning or good afternoon, depending on where you are joining from. My name is Pınar Karekaya. I am an economist at the FAO Liaison Office in Geneva. And today I will be speaking on behalf of Mr. Dominic Burjon, the director of our office. It's my pleasure to welcome you today to the first session of the FAO in Geneva, Social Protection Dialogue Series, organized in close collaboration with FAOs, inclusive rural transformation and gender equality division in Rome. The thematic dialogue series on social protection aims to raise awareness on the role of social protection as a key instrument for poverty reduction and inclusive growth in rural areas and, in turn, as a key instrument for achieving the objectives and targets of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. Through the engagement of distinguished speakers, the Social Protection Dialogue Series showcases concrete examples of achievements made by countries in strengthening and extending social protection systems as a core ingredient of their strategies, seeking to promote more resilient, inclusive, efficient and sustainable agri-food systems. While being open to all, the dialogue series is primarily intended to foster discussion between participants and inform and engage with representations of member states based in Geneva. As you may already know, the first dialogue series held in September focused on pathways for extending universal coverage of social protection. The second session addressed the role of social protection for inclusive climate action. And the third and the last one to date, elaborated on why and how social protection can and should be leveraged to unspate and respond to shocks. Finally, our session will seek to increase the understanding of the positive contribution of social protection schemes towards more inclusive, resilient and sustainable agri-food systems by contributing to food security and nutrition, promoting decent and sustainable livelihoods, and supporting environmental sustainability at global, regional and country levels. This dialogue is particularly timely as we are one week away from the UN Food Systems Summit stock-taking moment, which will take place in Rome from the 24th of July to the 26th of July next week. Today's event is the result of a collaboration between FAO in Geneva and FAO social protection team in headquarters. Let me extend a one thank you to the FAO social team, social protection team, in particular to Marco Noz and his team for supporting the preparation of this series. Before starting, let me remind you of some housekeeping rules for today's session. The session will last about 90 minutes and it will be recorded. Please keep your microphones muted. I encourage you to post your comments and questions in the Q&A module throughout the session. At the end of the presentations, we will try to accommodate as many questions as the time permits during the Q&A session. Now I would like to give the floor to our moderator, Ms. Lauren Phillips. Please, Lauren, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Pinar, and thank you for welcoming all of us. And good afternoon, good morning to all of you. I am Lauren Phillips. I'm the Deputy Director of the Inclusive World Transformation and Gender Quality Division of FAO, which is co-sponsoring this event, and we have a fantastic set of speakers today. And I think that you'll all find it's going to be a very rich conversation, learning from global, regional, and national experts on the topic of the nexus between food systems and social protection. Before I introduce the speakers and a little bit of the structure, I would like to just sort of open on why we're having this particular session within the context of the seminar series that Pinar mentioned. So, last week, FAO in collaboration with its UN agency partners, EFAWFP, UNICEF, and WHO published the new SOFI report. The SOFI provides us an annual sort of update on food insecurity, undernourishment, and hunger in the world, and the numbers that were reported last week remain much higher than we would hope with 735 million people experiencing hunger in 2022, which represents an increase of more than 120 million people compared to the levels that we were having pre-pandemic. So we were on positive trend of reducing hunger and poverty in the world until we had a series of joint shocks, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. And the projections suggest that out of line with the SDG objective to have zero hunger by 2030, 600 million people will still be facing hunger in 2030. And we also see in that report that a very large number of people, more than 2 billion people are suffering from moderate or severe food insecurity, and that more than 3 billion people. So a very large percentage of global population cannot afford what FAO has defined as a healthy diet in conjunction with our partners. Now, we know that a huge number of people, in fact, almost half of the world, or nearly 4 billion people, are either employed directly in agri-food systems or are linked to households which are using agri-food systems to maintain their livelihoods. And a large share of those people are poor and vulnerable. And given the series of shocks that I described, like COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, and especially climate change, this sort of set of combination is making it such that a number of people who depend on agri-food systems for their livelihoods face a number of challenges in accessing adequate and nutritious diets. They have troubles reaching social protection services, agricultural insurance, and often, unfortunately, these kinds of food systems are failing to deliver decent livelihoods and equitable benefits for people dependent upon them, despite the fact that we know that agri-food systems can be a very major driver on reducing poverty and helping to distribute economic opportunities equitably. And so in that context, I think it's clear that policies around agri-food systems and food policies are currently insufficient because they don't do enough to ensure that we reduce the number of people experiencing food insecurity or accessing healthy diets or having good levels of nutrition and that we need to have additional support mechanisms to ensure that we have decent, resilient, and sustainable livelihoods for that nearly 4 billion people I mentioned who are dependent on agri-food systems. Well-designed social protection systems are a really critical component of having an inclusive and sustainable agri-food system transformation. And I think that our speakers will say much more about this because they help to achieve multiple goals like reducing poverty, improving food security and nutrition, helping people access decent jobs, and ensuring that people have better natural resource management which can help to strengthen their resilience, including to climate-related shocks or other shocks. So that's the sort of framing of our conversation today. Now, let me tell you a little bit about our very distinguished panelists and how we're going to structure the conversation. So we're going to start with three keynote speakers. We have Dr. David Navarro, Mr. Renato Domes-Guggino, and Mr. Navid Akbar with us. David is the strategic director and the co-founder of 4SD, which supports agri-food system transformation across the world. He's going to kick off the session by framing a little bit the current context of crisis and what the relationship is between social protection and food system transformation, highlighting some challenges and opportunities. And then we'll pass to the other two speakers who will provide us two very interesting country case studies from different regions. So first we'll hear from Mr. Renato-Guggino, who's the special advisor for international affairs at the Ministry of Social Development in Brazil. He's going to present the government of Brazil's ongoing efforts to improve the performance of agri-food systems and their use of social protection interventions to talk about food security and nutrition. And Mr. Akbar will then take the floor to present the actions taken by the government of Pakistan to improve livelihoods of workers and mitigate the impacts of climate change on agri-food systems through social protection. Mr. Akbar is the director general of the National Social Economic Registry and Conditional Cash Transfer Program, which is called the Benazir Income Support Program in Pakistan. I think that this will help us to see how social protection can contribute to building inclusive and resilient sustainable agri-food systems. So thank you so much for joining us. And after we hear from our three speakers, we're going to have a panel discussion, which will be led by Ms. Valerie Schmidt, who's the deputy director of social protection at the ILO, and Dr. Osame Badin, who's the executive chairperson of Academia 2063, which is an Africa-based nonprofit research organization aiming to provide data, capacity-building policy analysis to enable African countries to achieve the African Union's agenda 2063 of inclusive and sustainable development and shared economic prosperity. We will also have Dr. Osame Badin provide insights about the African context, and so it's a pleasure to have you all here today. Let me go ahead that now and pass the floor to David Navarro to introduce the role that social protection can and should play in the context of food systems and crises. Over to you please. So, Lauren Phillips, thank you very much indeed for this invitation. It's absolute privilege to be on a panel with Renata Godinio and Navid Akbar, and I'm super grateful to FAO in particular for making this possible. All protocols observed. As Lauren said just now, in my brief remarks, I'd like to offer a question, and why we believe from the UN Global Crisis Response Group that it is absolutely essential to make sure that protection can be made more widely available. I have four headings for my remarks. Crisis past, crisis now, protection need and protection potential. I first got deeply involved in the current crisis in the early months of last year. And I was invited by the United Nations Secretary General to be one of the leaders of the food work stream of his new global crisis response group on food, energy and finance. Another in which I was involved noted that there is a deepening and interconnected multi crisis in food, energy and finance systems that's being precipitated by cascading shocks, resulting from COVID-19 accelerating climate violent conflicts and increases in the cost of living in many cases as a result of local currency depreciations. The global crisis response group referred to this as a cost of living crisis. And vulnerability assessments undertaken in 2022 and 2023 showed just how dramatic this crisis is. Right now, 103 countries are highly exposed to perturbations in food, energy and finance systems that's seven more than a year ago. 48 countries are exposed to disturbances in all three of the systems. And that's an increase from 36 countries a year ago. All together, 30 countries over the last year have become more vulnerable and 11 countries less vulnerable. Of the very affected countries, 63 are most affected by financial systems challenges, 58 by food systems challenges and 56 by challenges in energy systems. This is really an extraordinary crisis. Right now, I am going to describe how we perceive it is feeding through and affecting so many hundreds of millions of people. Although prices are for food, fertilizer and indeed energy have come down in the last few months on the world market. They are remaining stubbornly high in many local settings. Life is becoming more expensive for people on low incomes, particularly in low income nations. There's already been said, it's small hold of farmers and agricultural laborers who are particularly vulnerable at this time in food systems. Their households are sliding into deeper poverty, and they're not able to afford the nutritious food, health care, education and other basic needs they require for life. And it's especially women, children, older people and disabled people who are most at risk. For example, with 18% of the population food poor, half of those who are identified as food insecure are also identified as disabled people. And if a country has a very tight national budget, it's really difficult rapidly to mobilize extra domestic finance to protect people at the level and speed required. About one quarter of the world's nations are experiencing high levels of indebtedness and expend much of their budgets on debt servicing. And indeed debt servicing costs have shot up in recent months because interest rates have gone up globally. And the interest rates have gone up because wealthy nations are trying to control inflation, and some of them are doing very well. But the result is life is just much more expensive if you're a minister of finance in a poor nation, and you've got much less to spend on supporting people who are in difficulty. I mean, it's not as though it's impossible between December 22 and May 23. The number of social protection measures that have been implemented rose by 31% in response to the various shocks. There's a lot going on, but for people in debt-saddled countries, and there are 59 of those, the problem is so serious because the interest payments are just growing so fast. There are 45 developing countries are spending more public resources on debt repayments than on enabling people to access health care. And indeed globally, 3.3 billion people live in countries that spend more on interest repayments than on health or education. So what is to be done? Well, there's an enormous poverty slide underway. When people are suffering and they need protection, otherwise they will suffer in ways that will have long-term consequences for themselves and their families. Right at the centre has to be the need for food and nutrition security and decent and secure livelihoods that respect people's human rights. And promoting universal social protection is key to an inclusive and sustainable transformation of food systems. Strengthening social protection and food systems is an absolute priority for achieving the sustainable development goals. And social protection as is an important investment in the future. But it's also a right, a human right. And so accessible social protection schemes for consumers and for households for producers, small holder farmers and agricultural workers is key. And the state of food and security and nutrition in the world report just referred to says that cash transfers are the most efficient way of doing so. So why, why are we worried? Why are we worried for women and girls in particular? The answer is that globally our safety nets are creaking and in some cases are collapsing. Right now, the World Food Programme, which is the world safety net for people who are food insecure is massively underfunded. Now indebted countries are not able to get the finance they need for emergency access to cash for social protection for small holders, labourers, people and low income, the Indigenous people, all with a view to protecting households, women and children. If we don't manage to up the availability, people will search for food and for shelter. People will suffer as they search and people will struggle as they suffer. And already we are seeing people are starving. This is an emergency. That's really the crisis of my lifetime. And I commend FAO for hosting this discussion today. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, David for these very important and quite stark remarks about the challenges that we're facing on ensuring that governments and international actors can provide adequate protection. These are the challenges that you that you laid out. I'm going to turn immediately to our next presenter so Renato the floor is yours. We welcome your sharing your experience of Brazil. Thank you Lauren, and speaking after David's stirring speech. I'll try to take the lead on that crucial call for reinforcement of social protection schemes and social protection safety nets. So this Brazil is the country where as you see very briefly here. If I can present. I see you are presenting yourself so can you go to the next slide please. So as you can see, this is the prevalence of hunger has come back to Brazil after the country has been left out of the FAO hunger map. In the last few years, unfortunately, the situation has deteriorated and now from the numbers that were announced in the last Sophie, the food insecurity scale to higher in its moderate and severe scale so that that's the effect of government that undermined some of the social protection networks that were put in place before and also the effects of the pandemic. That of course, like the much the rest of the world has an imperiled much of the way of leaving people. So next slide please. So briefly to talk about the the effects of more nutrition and obesity that you of course know very much how not only the deficiency in calories but of proper nutrients and sometimes the, the exaggerated calories and the lack of nutrients can lead to obesity and malnutrition, even without the people being underweight so this is the prevalence that was a fact in people very use age range ranges in Brazil just last year so next slide. Thanks to the crux of the matter Brazil is a country that despite its problems is lucky to have the resources and the food production and the resources to put in place the necessary policies and networks to fight the problem. So we are having we are trying hard to put back some of the, the, the, the programs in place that were undermined in the last government and also trying to start new strategies adequate to this new era. So this is a very interesting concept figure here that what you can say that the different dimensions of food security and nutrition. Yes, as you know it's a very complex multifaceted subject. The very dimensions can be addressed by different policies and this requires multi sexual coordination and the role of social protection here is very important not only as one would assume for access and consumption but we can also see there a link on how they can affect positively the production as well. Next slide. Here's the same concept but translated in the systems that we have in place in Brazil. So specifically for Brazil, the national health system under the Ministry of Health promotes healthy eating education in primary health care. It evaluates food insecurity nutrition status and provides breastfeeding programs. At the same time, the social assistance and here is key in the Ministry of Social Development where I work. They run the social assistance centers. It is 1400 centers around the whole country, providing different services to vulnerable families and including the doorway to be for the families in need to be put into what is called a single registry, which is a huge database of all the families that can be targeted for social programs. And actually the Bolsa Família program, the headliner cash transfer program that is being restored to its proper modalities here in Brazil now after having suffered from some deviations of purpose. And the Bolsa Família program is the main, as David mentioned in his presentation, cash transfers. It's a cash transfer program that is indeed a very efficient way to fight the food security and nutrition and provide a number of other benefits. And finally, there is in Brazil food security and nutrition strategy based on its law that also relies on the other aspects but has specific programs directed at trying to secure proper food and nutrition to people which will go into a little bit more detail later next slide please. So this is briefly to show you the governance of the system in Brazil for food security. There is inter ministerial chamber for food security and nutrition that relies on 24 ministries to discuss and implement comprehensive programs like some of those that I have shown. So, each one acting in their own domains, but in a coordinated manner, and most crucially, the councils for food and nutrition security the consea is the National Council, having a network of state level and even in many municipalities there is a municipality level councils for food security and nutrition, in which the civil society is is actually leading the process so it's a consultive mechanism that then goes to the proposals go to the government and every four years this whole system congregates in the national food and nutrition security conferences with guidelines and priorities for the plan for the next four years. So next slide please. Here's an example on how both the familiar the class transfer program contributes to monetization and obesity so there there was a study done a while ago when both the familiar was in the apex that compared children on both the familiar that were there for four years as compared to those who were from a single year because of course we wouldn't be studying families that could qualify to the program and not give them so it's impossible to really do this study with and without both the familiar mind you so the study that was done was for recent entrance versus entrance for four years and even with that kind of baseline. There was a 50 lower chance of monetization in the the children who were in the program and role for ready for years versus the recent entrance, along with a 10% lower chance of being overweight so this detection of an increased consumption of the most important and nutritious food groups in the children of the families that had already stated the program for more time. So the boss of familiar is not unconditional trust cash transfer it has the conditions including the enrollment of children in school and in health there is a proper follow up of the health schedule of the children, including the being up to date with the vaccination and following other conditionalities including this monitoring of nutritional status two times per year so the family has to be up to date on the services so next slide please. What happens now with the role of the social assistance the teams and the social protection that has the centers and dedicated professionals across the country. So the one of the most important service on the menu of this system for for social protection is called the integral family attention and protection service the pipe. And it provides these among other things they provide special attention to families that are in a rear with their conditionalities the ones that are mentioned including school and child health. And they can also point out food security and nutrition issues for those families because the conditionality is not there to to throw people out of the program in case they don't comply so when there is no compliance. With these conditionalities the service is actionable to go into the families diagnose their difficulties provide ways and also point out maybe they can't keep their kids in school because of lack of access in the region and lack of the proper offering of those services crucial services by the state there is no way for parents to leave their kids or to find the proper health systems. So this this is all considered an efficient strategy to overcome the gaps that are impeding fulfillment of those conditionalities and then addressing not only the income, but also these other dimensions that could perpetuate hunger and poverty throughout these these kids lives. Next slide. So here's another example of interlinkages between different systems and domains of food security so the food purchase program is also a very well known program in Brazil that is being restored right now that was discontinued. And it within the government can ensure prices for family farmers or with more older farming as it is more usually known in English. And in the new legal framework that we hear this this these purchases from the family farmers. They are destined usually they were destined to the national school meals program so this is being restored but now there is the preparations on going to buy even more of the produce from family farmers to go to the, the network for the social systems network and the food and nutrition specific facilities that we have in this strategy, including the popular restaurants that are subsidized restaurants community kitchens and food banks, and private public and philanthropic health education justice networks. So this is a broadening of the food purchase program. And what it does is not only provides access to more quality real food to these people's in the school meals programs and those who are accessing these services but also strengthening family farming. Enabling them to reach more scales to have more income and in this way, helping to transform food systems. So next slide please. So I, I have dealt with the main programs and actions that we have had for a number of years now and now discussed strategies that are being put in place for the next years that still being discussed. So this, the idea is to move forward for a strategy specific for the cities. So 85% of the presidents live in urban areas as 80% of globally produced food Brazil also consumed in urban areas. Cities have their own, their own needs, their own challenges. So sometimes it's easier to accept food but not any kind of food. So you have heard the concept of food deserts and food swamps, which are areas on in the city that are lacking in any kind of access to healthy nutritious food. Instead, providing only low grade industrialized the low, low nutrient food and in this way increasing malnutrition, even if calories enough calories are consumed. So, many of the Brazilian detectives severe food insecurity living cities. There is a lot of inequality between the urban groups and the geography in the cities. And the difficulty to assess not only education about how to, how to find and choose proper food but also transport to the places where this food could be available. Next. Nato, I hate to interrupt you because it's super interesting but if you could finish we are running over time. So here's to give you just a brief example of these installations know this facilities for food security, including the community kitchen social restaurants the distribution centers for the food purchase program. Next. And also these family supermarkets so they are all serving themselves with these food from family farming they have some help from governments at all levels federal state and municipalities. And this is the kind of thing that next slide please that we are mapping to provide the comprehensive supports to please next slide as well. The urban agriculture program is also being put in place. Something that cities are ready starting and the national government wants to support as well. Next. This is the final slide here just to summarize and integrate how this national strategy for food and nutrition security in cities would integrate the programs that I mentioned before already existing. We are integrating them for cities the mapping of food deserts and the integration of these facilities to promote to promote the supply of healthier food, the urban agriculture program and the strengthening of family farming, promoting these shorter social and consumption circuits for the population in the city so this is our next level that you want to delve in. So thank you very much and apologize for for going a little bit ahead but it's a very interesting subject. We were to build new global back or alliance on food security and nutrition social protection has to be in the forefront so going from the words of David so not all countries are fortunate to have the means that Brazil has to put this in place. So those countries that would join this back should be helped by those that can help to make this a reality because we know it works. Thank you. Thank you so much for the super interesting presentation and I'm really was impressed by the amount of coordination and the mechanisms that you mentioned in fact there's a question about that in the chat already. Let me pass to Mr. Akbar, David over to you please to give us a little bit of a sense of the role of social protection on ensuring inclusivity in climate action and to talk about Pakistan. Thank you very much for having me here to present a Pakistan's case. Let me share my screen presentation with you. Hope you can see the presentation. Yeah, so, yeah, I'll quickly start with the country's context to just let you know about about our country a bit and the social protection. The key drivers for social protection our country we are the country with 249 million population ranked amongst the 43 countries most exposed to poverty risks. All around 70% of population lives in rural areas. 30% population is food insecure. 36% population is is like out of school the children, the school is going children out of school. We have 21.9% population living below the poverty line if you calculate with the cost of basic need poverty line. For banks, a poverty line indicates 39.8% population living below the poverty line and we have around 40% children between age of six to 59 months of standard which is basically an evidence of the issue of this food insecurity. Basically, the explanation of the stenting figures, 17.7% wasting 40.2 is the stenting and 31.5% is the underweight and, and this stenting issue we are facing since 90s 60s almost linear line. And we are trying to, you know, address this issue with different interventions. We all know role of social protection and the cash transfer particularly we can end extreme poverty and create more inclusive societies by developing human capital and social protection programs can help communities adapt to climate related shocks and stress, such as by providing insurance mechanism and access to essential services and social protection can alleviate poverty and enhance livelihood, reducing the vulnerability of individuals and communities to climate change. And for that probably we need to invest more in people through nutrition healthcare quality education jobs and scale. Bene's income sport program in this all background was established back in 2008 as countries largest social safety net with the objective to provide financial assistance to economically distressed person and families. We have 91% beneficiaries are the ultra poor poor or vulnerable due to poverty due to various shocks facing multiple deprivation such as access to education and health. Largely within school lively opportunities dependent on casual labor and former worker and daily wages. Only 19% of a dirt woman in beneficiary households are literate, and a majority of the beneficiaries were lacking the national ID, which is the basic requirement for getting benefits back in 2008. Over the core initiatives are of benefit incomes for program. We have a database of 35 million households, which is being, which is dynamic and updated being updated on regular basis. And are all programs are targeted programs based on our national socio economic registry. We have a core program on condition cash transfer program started in 2008, and we are covering 9 million families through this program. And then we have to condition cash transfer programs. First one is focusing on 7.5 focusing on education, because we are covering primary to high secondary education and currently 7.5 million children are benefiting from the program. We also have another condition cash transfer program linked with health and nutrition started back in 2016, through which we are providing specialized nutritious food to a pregnant dating woman and children under two years, and the main focus of this program is to prevent from getting pregnant and we have around 0.8 million families. Part of this program. And then we have small scale undergrad scholarship program, covering 92,000 students, and time to time we are also implementing our emergency cash program which is shock responsive. Our biggest bigger programs were during COVID and recently we we also implemented our programs, the shock responsive program in our flood back in July, August 2022 to just high to just share it with you the kind of database we are managing so the 35 million households we have the information of all the households on agriculture and livestock land holding by area and the socioeconomic status, a cultivated land crops types, access to microfinance institutions, and we also have information of individuals like season seasonal paid employees deal daily wage laborers linked with agriculture on cultivator sharecropper livestock or contract cultivator unpaid family worker contributing family helper. And with the help of all this data we are actually implementing our targeted programs, whether it's unconditional and conditional cash transfer programs and also the target subsidies that we are managing. This targeted subsidy for wheat flour and seed that we are managing through these through this database to just share it with you the 9 million families that we have who are getting benefit from the program. 70% belong to the ruler area of our country and only 30% are from urban and and and amongst that around 12% engage in aggregated professions. The family that we are are providing the cash transfer with. And the impact of individual consumption. So this slide will let you know that the average consumption per family for for bottom two condolences around $90 in our country. And as per global practices, you have to cover 20 to 25% of the total consumption of the family and our cash transfer program, the unconditional cash transfer is covering around providing around $11 which is around around 12% of the total consumption. But with the with the component of component of the conditional cash transfer program, we are covering around 17% of the total consumption of the family. And so out of this 25,000 this $90. And 36% is basically related to food and nonalcoholic beverages and the ISP through provision of this unconditional and conditional cash transfer. This $11 plus the conditional cash transfer amount as per impact evaluation baseline study, more than 60% expenditure is going towards food consumption. And the rest is all you can see is 40% so the cash transfer has a major contribution in meeting the food consumption of the families that we are sporting. So this is this slide will basically tell you how we are actually helping in creating the economic activity the local economic activity in the rural areas are recipient is the woman. And also, you know, addressing this gender inequality issue through that. So she's the recipient of unconditional and conditional cash transfer. So, you know, the rich population and the upper middle class. So their contribution is more towards, I would say the international economy because they used to invest and they used to spend money on the on on branded shopping but the, the consumer recipient is basically contributing to the local economy. So, so, basically, the cash transfer that we are feeding in at helping in increasing access to transportation telecommunication and data for household supplies. The individual impact is there is a fact on agriculture labor and production and non for non form trade. The market demand supply is being impacted transportation business and telecom business is being impacted. And the most important impact that we are driving through to our initial cash transfer is the consumption, especially the food related expenditure, and the human empowerment and to improve nutrition with the help of the cash transfer. So that is all from my side and would would love to respond to questions from the audience. Thank you very much for patients hearing. Thank you so much I think it's a super interesting example as well of the of the very comprehensive coverage. I think this is some grew over time is also super interesting. Let me pass over to the, to the two panelists we have to sort of get some first reactions and then I know that people are keen to ask questions so my colleague over to Valerie, I love. Can you, building on what we just heard, can you tell us why you consider social protection important for just transitions and social justice and agri food systems. And maybe also how the need for agri food system transformation could be better links to a political agenda for universal social protection. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Lauren. Yes, first I would like to to remind I mean we have the good examples of Brazil and Pakistan but I would like to, to have a look at a little bit that the social protection situation in the rural economy over. We estimate that globally, more than three billion people live in rural areas and one billion in there are working in the agriculture sector. And as was mentioned already by all the presenters rural populations really face higher risks of poverty malnutrition hunger, poor health work related injuries, natural disasters and and the impact of climate change. So they have, we estimate that they have three times higher risk to live in extreme poverty compared to people in urban areas. And as was mentioned by all the presenters social protection is is a key policy tool to to address poverty and vulnerability, vulnerability in rural in the rural areas. However, despite this high and increasing risks of poverty and malnutrition and vulnerability that that they face rural workers and their families are today the least protected. We estimate for instance that as as regards access to health care social health protection. The benefits of the people living in rural areas don't have any access to social health protection, compared to 22% in urban urban populations. The situation we are in and just transitions and social justice in in agri food systems for the ILO means that all the workers and should have access to decent work in rural areas. So decent work means dignity means equality means a fair income, safe working conditions and obviously social protection. So universal social protection is for us really a key tool for achieving decent work in the agri food systems and an interesting piece of work that we wanted to share with you is in May this of this year. There has been a major sectoral discussions at the ILO that led to the development of policy guidelines for the promotion of decent work in the agri food sector. This document was adopted by governments workers and employers from all member states of the ILO so 187 member states. And these guidelines really recognize among many many recommendations, the importance of universal social protection for the workers in the agri food sector. And so they really urge member states to realize the human right to social protection for these workers. So how this can happen. First, we need to ensure that I have an infection so it's difficult for me to speak today but I will manage. Don't worry. We're very clear and don't worry. First, we need to ensure that rural workers, including the seasonal and the migrant workers in rural areas are covered by social security law and by labor law and social security law. This is super important. This is for us really the first step to guarantee their rights to social security. We have heard about several cash transfers, Bossa Familia, the Venezia income support program. In some countries, this type of programs are embedded in law in others there are more adult mechanisms that can be dismantled from one day to the other. We believe at the ILO that if you really want to exercise a right, you need to have a law. And then beyond the legislation. It's of course super important to implement this law otherwise the right is just an illusion. And the so this transformation of from law to really effective coverage is not automatic. In many cases, there is a need either to design programs that are really responding to the needs and the situation of workers and their families in rural areas. In others, it is, you can start with a social security scheme that exists but you really need to, to adapt it to the, to these realities. There are many examples of flexibility measures adaptation that have really led to massive extension of social protection in rural areas. Renato has mentioned the Bossa Familia in Brazil. I would like to also mention in Brazil, another, another scheme, which is a contributory rural pension scheme that covers both wage workers and agriculture producers. And the type of adaptations that that was introduced is for instance in the ways social security contributions are calculated. They are calculated in percentage of the wage in clay in case we are talking about agriculture workers, but for producers. Farm owners, they are calculated the contribution are calculated as a presentation of the sales value of the crop of the harvest. So you can see that really, you can countries can are already introducing many, many adaptations so that these schemes really answer the needs ends the constraints of the agriculture workers. There are also other examples such as in Ecuador, where a third of the population lives in rural areas, and they have established this Seguro Social Campesino so the farmers social insurance scheme that provides access to health care maternity benefits disability and old age benefits to farmers and fishermen and also their family members. And here, what is interesting is that the contributions social security contributions are heavily subsidized by the government. So that, of course, to increase accessibility of this scheme. And also another interesting feature is that it's the farmers organizations so associations corporate etc that are responsible for registering their members to the social security scheme. So, these approaches are successful and at the I law and together with a field we are documenting them, because they really address the specific barriers that workers in the rural areas face when they want to affiliate social security. This can be a legal barriers this can be administrative or financial barriers financial barriers is like for instance, because the contributions are too high so if there is a subsidy of the government this really helps. This can be various linked to the lack of organization or insufficient information and I just wanted to mention that we have published together with FAO a paper on ways to extend social protection to rural populations. I hope it can be shared with the audience. So, in addition to all these elements I wanted to flag also the importance of representation and ensuring that all these schemes that are developed in the rural areas try as much as possible to involve organizations that represents the workers and the employers in the agriculture sector. This is the case of Mexico for instance that has developed agreements collective agreements in the sector of the sugar cane, the sugar cane agribusiness, where the Mexican Social Security Institute has every discussion with workers and employers, the producers and the workers in this sugar cane agribusiness sector to really ensure the affiliation of the workers to the Social Security to facilitate also the collection of contributions. And, and this has allowed them for each campaign know to to affiliate around 100,000 workers. So, all these examples show many efforts actually to expand social protection to workers in the agriculture sector and really to contribute to transform the informal employment which is prevailing in the agriculture sector into what we call decent work at the ILO. And this this transformation from informal to formal formal work or decent work contributes also to the overall rural development that is inclusive. And, but social protection alone, I mean it's it's key as all the presenters have said but it's not sufficient. If we are talking about developing the Agri Agri food system. We have through the development of integrated and combine policy approaches and measures and incentives that this is this can happen. And actually the examples that were given from Pakistan and from Brazil showed that actually it was not only one policy but it was more a set of different policies that are very important and they it's very important to link them together. In a joint mission with a number of colleagues from FAO World Food Program, a few few weeks ago in Malawi. And here it's clear that for the development of the agriculture and the shift from subsistence farming to more productive value change in the in the in the area of agriculture production. There is a need of course to access to facilitate access to social protection there is today no social protection system in Malawi for like 80% of the population. There is a need to facilitate the access to markets and commercialization. There is a need to support the transformation of agriculture products to increase the added value of the final products. There is a need to implement skills development strategies and tivets that are adapted. There is a need to facilitate the access to finance today, microfinance is at 30% of rate of interest so it's just unacceptable to combat child labor, etc. There are many many different policies that need to be put in place together. And this is exactly the type of work that we do as part of the global accelerator on jobs and social protection for just transitions. It's a joint UN initiative it's what the UN system calls a high impact initiative. There is one of the 12 high impact initiatives that will contribute to the transformation and the acceleration of the SDGs. In all countries that that are interested in implementing the accelerator, the development of this type of integrated policy approaches in the agri-food system seems to be really one of the priorities one of the entry points. This will have most probably impact on the livelihood, of course, of the agriculture workers and their families. It will support the development of more productive value chains in the agriculture sector that will lead also to food security at country level. And it's also linked and contributes to the environmental sustainability, for instance by of course strengthening the resilience of agriculture workers and the families in rural populations in general to climate shocks and over shocks. So, yeah, so I hope that we can continue this discussion at some of our points on this, on the preliminary results of the global accelerator. And we have, we are jointly organizing a big event during the SDG summit on the 17 of September on the global accelerator. And in particular it's linked to the agri-food systems. So thank you. Thank you so much, Valady. Very interesting. And I think a number of the things you said were reflected in our presentations and give some sense of, you know, the way that you started by talking about rural systems but we had also seen, of course, from the presentation presentation from Brazil that there's a need, a growing need in urban systems as well. And I think you gave a very comprehensive overview of the different international mechanisms in place. My colleagues put the link to the paper that you mentioned in the chat as well. So, that's great. Thank you so much. I'm going to pass over. I have a question for Dr. Vadian from an African perspective. Can you tell us why this agenda is very important for the transformation of agri-food systems? Can you say a little bit about the trends, gaps and opportunities you've identified in terms of designing and implementing integrated social protection, which would contribute to agri-food system transformation in sub-Saharan Africa. I take note, for example, of the statistic Valady mentioned about Malawi, right, where 80% of the population is not being covered. So, over to you. Thank you very much for being here. All right. Thank you very much. I'll be sharing a couple of slides briefly as a reaction to what I heard from Brazil, Pakistan also just in the comments here. Social protection is going to be playing a double role in the transformation of food systems across African countries. It's first to drive down the massive level of credibility across communities, but also helping build preparedness and crisis response capacity in the era of climate crisis. We're just not dealing with transforming value chains with all its, I'm sorry, for systems with all its challenges but also in the time of climate crisis. And you're starting at a very high level of poverty and entrench chronic vulnerability so social protection should be targeting both this chronic level as well as boosting preparedness and crisis response capacity. Now, if you're doing that at a low level of budgetary resources, social protection cannot be primarily an entitlement. It has to be a means to boost productivity, asset building, alongside dealing with the health and the nutrition issue. So it's much more complex setting than in an environment where you can have an entitlement approach to that. And also for the same reasons, social protections have to be very targeted, very efficient to stretch the limited resources that we have. I'm going to be sharing a couple of slides to try and illustrate using examples. I'm going to stop something else here. I'm using to stop use another program. Okay, so now I can share my screen. I use example from a lot of you with a nice coincidence, because what I just talked about Malawi, and I'll also be showing an example from Senegal. So policy in the eye of social protection in the context of limited public resources and large scale product vulnerability, where you cannot be everywhere, and you don't have the resources to be everywhere has to be targeted. And it also has to understand the nature and the drivers of vulnerability. So you can focus both on them during normal times, but also be better prepared to respond in the times of crisis. Most African countries are approaching social protections in a more generic fashion, trying to get resources out there to the vulnerable populations trying to compensate for shocks. But the impact the sustainability the durability of action requires a refined approach to that and that's what we're trying to get at here. In this case, it was during COVID. We wanted to understand exactly where the most vulnerable communities and households are located. This is fundamental information to have for countries to have the best targeted, the most effective social protection program. So driving vulnerability among these communities has to do with the level of malnutrition, the food poverty, the distance to health sectors, health facilities, the access to infrastructure, the prevalence of chronic diseases there's so many different things that are reducing the risk of these communities of those shocks, even in normal times, they're driving down the capacity to survive. In that sense, having a good understanding of the different drivers and the list can go longer, you can bring in climate risk, for example, water availability risk, heat risk, whatever you might want to bring in here. But the concept is you have a composite vulnerability indicator that allow you to locate the most vulnerable communities and be ready to act in times of crisis. And in times of normal times to focus on those drivers. If it's, for example, prevalence of chronic diseases is the biggest constraints to livelihoods, then you focus on tackling chronic diseases during normal times. It is, if it is a high poverty, food poverty, you focus on boosting productive capacities access to assets in normal times before you have the crisis. And when the crisis hit, you know where to focus. You see the road areas are the most exposed with the lowest capacity to absorb shocks in normal times before the crisis hit. It's just similar to what most municipalities deal do in temperate zone areas, we have snowstorms. They know before the snowstorms come where to position the snow cloud to be able to deal with the snowstorm. African countries and others need to be in that position to know exactly the places which have the least absorption capacity to deal with shocks and be there and be prepared with the right programs, the right equipments, and the right tools, and the right information so that they can deliver. But to do that also requires that one is capable of tracking progress in the short run. These indicators you see here are not moveable in the short run. You cannot change starting within a few months, it takes years. You cannot move food poverty within months, it takes years. So we're proposing another indicator so that while we're acting in the short run, we can measure progress and to see whether we're moving the needle, and more importantly, whether we're returning normalcy. The biggest really issue around shocks, vulnerability and protection in African countries is that it should not be acceptable that any shock that comes just leads to wide ranging disruptions that tends to be perpetrated over time and therefore increasing the level of chronic vulnerability. So being able to be better positions to follow when we respond to track to measure another making progress is important. For that we're proposing using micro nutrient intake or deficiency gaps, which is just like the fever thermometer in an emergency room. Allow you to track whether your emergency interventions are having an impact on household, you can make a consumption on a monthly quarterly or on a half yearly basis, and then see whether your interventions allowing you to move the needle and to restore normalcy after a shock. What it also does, it allows you to focus your interventions if you're distributing foods to know which foods in which communities will have the best impact in restoring nutritional status on this household, right. You can get to this. Here we have just shown six micro nutrients. We have done this for about 15 countries, and it's about a dozen micro nutrients that we track, so that when you intervene, you know the community situation, both on production and consumption side. You know the subsidy income transfer for distribution to align that with the most deficient micro nutrients so you really hit two targets, you are restoring nutritional status, but also you can track your impact and effectiveness as you go. So to summarize basically social protection in the context of transforming for systems and the context of climate crisis requires better targeting in particular when you're dealing with limited budget and resources. Target better the communities in the households across different dimensions of vulnerability. Once you have that information you can zero in during normal time, not just during crisis, during normal times on those dimensions that are driving vulnerability in different communities is the same. So that kind of granularity is going to be important, but also when you intervene during shots you need to know that you make in progress, you need to not only target the interventions to where people are hurting the mouth, but also you have to be in a position to track and know that you make in progress and therefore reducing chronic vulnerability as you go. So let me stop here and look forward to the question. Thank you. Thank you so much respond and very, very detailed maps very interesting to see the variation even within a single a single national context. We had additional questions for our panelists. But I see also that I would like to leave enough time for people who are listening in to ask questions. There are two questions in the chat and I also appreciate that both Hinata and Navid have answered a couple of questions which have come up. So I could start by reading out the two questions in the chat and then if anybody else has a question they can either raise their hand or put it in the Q&A. So the first one is about Ecuador specifically, and how rural cooperatives are facilitating the access to social insurance and Ecuador through the Campesino scheme. I'm sorry, this question might be to you because you mentioned Ecuador, and I would like to know what's their specific role in terms of targeting or collective access. And if you have any insights on that. And then there's another question. I think regarding Pakistan from, from Jungrin Kim asking about the uptake rate of the social protection programs and so the question is, is the take up rate 100%. That would be really great if it is because he mentions that non take up is a serious issue related to targeting measures. And maybe this question could go both to Hinata and to to Navid. So let me pass the floor first of all and then I'll pass to the other panelists. Yeah, thanks a lot. I have all the information what I know is that they are, you know, in social security you can either register as an individual, if you're a self employed worker, or as either as a salary worker within an enterprise, or you can have sort of group membership group insurance. And I think this is a little bit what is happening in Ecuador, where the farmers organizations are really ensuring that all their members are registered so it's like a group, you know, a membership, which, which is, I think, a great has many advantages because for the Ecuadorian Social Security Institute, it reduces a little bit the, the cost or the management cost and time in spent in identifying the farmers in registering each of them and collecting the contributions, etc. So since the, the farmers organization is doing it. It's like a sort of intermediary agent that yeah really helps this call this the registration of all the farmers. So from a pure insurance theory of insurance perspective it also reduces the risks that you have a farmers who really needed needed need social insurance the most that we register and others who need less or perceive that they need less will not register here with a group insurance and so it really creates a sort of solidarity within the group. And this is also an advantage when you when you do insurance mechanisms. So I think I hope it answers, we are, we have a collection of country briefs on our website and once in a while we publish them in a book. The book from 2019 and the book from 2023 is going to be published in September. And there is the case of this, this case, I will try to find the link to, to the case and put it in the chat as well. Thank you. Thank you so much. Can I ask if you want to come in on the question first about uptake. Yeah, so basically the uptake of the roughly 97% and the reason for this 3% is basically because of this biometric based payment mechanisms that is in place. Around 3% basically usually facing the problem, because they are a bit, you know, from the old age group. So sometimes they feel they face some problems but we try to we really try to resolve by by wide listing them and and and giving them disbursement through other means modes of the payment systems. So 97% uptake is there and let me share it with you that when we start disbursement of our cash transfer program around 75% withdraw the cash in the first seven to 10 days of of the disbursement schedule. Only 20 to 25% takes another two weeks to withdraw the cash so uptake is quite high that we have. The ruler uptake is is quite high as compared to the urban uptake the urban population slowly withdrawing their cash, but the ruler quickly like within a week they usually get their payments from from their data costs. Thanks. Do you want to add anything on that question or there was. We could also talk a little bit about the coordination amongst parts of government which was something that you had already answered in the chat. I passed you. Thank you, Lauren. Yeah, I could try to address address both briefly so this this issue of uptake is is very crucial. So, the, in case in our case most of them in the cash transfer program, they need to enroll in the single registry which is done through the social services, the networks, and especially during the last few years there was not enough attention to properly targeting this in some cases, people were enrolled that shouldn't be in the program, because they would be higher than the threshold of already their basic income and some controls were relaxed in this aspect. On the other hand, there was not enough of an effort to find what we call the active search for people that have the right to be in the registry and receive the benefits but they, and some kinds of the what we call the population in a situation of street situational so many can see and others live situations like these and some cases are not informed and now we are having quite a lot of success even constraining a bit the intended budget because over the last few months the program for this active enrollment has been going very well so now in the in the last month of June closing we had the 3,000 new people enrolled in the families, because the program is directed at the families 3,000 new families, 300,000 people in 100 more as 100 families enrolled in the program, due to the active search. So this this refinement process is ongoing and the maintenance of the registry is the technical challenge that really needs to be addressed. Speaking of technical challenges this is also a issue of coordination, so it is very important to have formal mechanisms in the country to a bit force or lead the different agencies to coordinate so food systems and food security nutrition ranges across health education, social services, farming, so many different ministries are involved. And in some cases, so the example in Brazil, I answered with a bit of detail in the chat questions for for all here to access but it is very important to build this formal structure, which is in Brazil formalize the law and decrees that the ministries they have to get together they are obligated to do a national conference every four years that then direct the strategy, and the programs that have to be further refined and developed with this inputs from the civil society also formally is with the proper governance of ways of representation so this is a process that has its own cost of course, but it's well worth it because it does provide this political will and push behind, maintaining the policies in the marketing course, introducing new policy ideas so one landmark law is the one that obligates the procurement that municipalities do for the school meals program that at least 30% comes from family farming. I think that was pushed by civil society for a number of years and was eventually adopted. So, and also for the control of the registries in the municipality so if the services are going well so a lot of this, if you build the structure the network and run the meeting. So eventually good things to happen so that's the lesson here that we've got for for this coordination network. That's the the hopeful finish, despite all the complications. As I don't see any other questions or hands though, and somebody can just sort of shout if they if they do I think I'm going to sort of pass for the panel ultimate word over to you David to ask you a sort of a question if you had to summarize what you've What do you think are the sort of key challenges that governments face in strengthening policies and improving investment for, you know, ensuring that there is adequate social protection to support agri-food system transformation. I personally think we heard two extraordinary presentations that are just absolutely full of lessons that I believe we can take on board. Of course, when you hear a case study. The first thing to do is to find out as much as possible. And then, having heard it to take some of the ideas out of that case study and put them to the test in one's own setting. As I listened to Dr Gordinho, I found myself very much influenced by the history of what's happened in Brazil, particularly the whole political basis of Bolsa Familia, the whole political basis of work for school meals, and the absolute need to create this short circuit between farmers schools and people. I also was impressed that there was some careful analysis of the impact of social protection on people's well being. And I was particularly interested in what was emerging about obesity reduction. This is a very, very difficult area in which to find any kind of association and I noticed that Renato was being quite cautious when interpreting it. So, the lessons of history are really important. Then I was listening very carefully to the presentation from Naveed. A very large scale initiative. A lot of careful design work, extremely thoughtful approaches, both to getting adequate coverage, and we had some lovely statistics of that. But also for ensuring that people benefit from the protection they receive. And then a lot of emphasis I thought on how best to better adjust what's on offer to people's situations. When I listened to Valerie, I thought what an enormous body of knowledge there is with ILO and how marvelous that this social protection accelerator is designed to basically get the experiences from different parts of the world and bring them together. Then Usman Badyan with his detailed case study of Malawi just I thought offered us a very valuable extra thing which was, if you're tight on money, then it does pay to adapt your social protection offer to what are determined by government to be the highest priority for people's well-being. I know that this is not always seen as the correct way to go, but after all everybody is trying to cope with extreme shortages and I found that very helpful. Now that was longer than two minutes, Lauren, but I couldn't just talk about one and I must say that's just a very partial impression by me. But what a privilege to hear this and I'm jolly glad it's being recorded because if I was teaching this, I would want to use at least some of this material as case study for practitioners because this is how you learn from the people who are really doing it. Thank you. Thank you and don't worry about going over the time because you helped to do my job, which was to close a little bit and by summarizing the insights I agree with you first that we heard some excellent case studies and some some very good interventions and it's great that it's been recorded because I'm sure that others will want to draw on those results. I think as we're one minute over time I would like to just sort of say one major thing moving forward. The first is obviously to thank all of you for participating and to our panelists and discussions for being here and for making it such a rich conversation. And the other thing I wanted to mention is that given that as various people have mentioned we have the UN food system summit plus to start taking moment happening next week in Rome, where I'm sure that social protection will be a critical part of the agenda and I wanted to mention the coalition of action of the food system summit on social protection for food systems transformation, which is hosted by the global coalition on universal social protection. And there are a number of stakeholders including FAO WFP UNICEF ILO IRC and countries like Pakistan as well as Chile and Peru who have already joined this coalition of action. And I think it's really important to make sure that this kind of seminar which has provided us a lot of information and allowed us to exchange some some views on challenges and approaches can be facilitated through that coalition to provide comprehensive support for those that are looking to build reform expand strengthen their social protection systems. So thank you so much for for your time and you know this dialogue series on social protection is going to continue after the summer break, and I'm sure that our colleagues will send you additional information about all of that and so thank you very much for being here and I'll close with that. Bye bye. Thank you. Thank you. Bye bye. Yes, I should say thank you so much to colleagues in Latin America for being awake so early. Bye bye.