Sustainable Food System in Southeast Asia Under and Beyond COVID-19 Policy Evidence and Call for Action a Conference Synthesis

The conference focused on the key role of research evidence for the design of policy and institutional innovations that accelerate the transformation to healthier, more sustainable, equitable, and resilient food systems. Research offers many important contributions to achieve the SDGs. It generates the basic inputs for innovations, i.e. policy and institutional innovations (incl. social and business innovations) as well as technology-based innovations to catalyze, support, and accelerate food systems transformation. Second, research assesses targets and actions by understanding the impliciations of various development pathways (for instance through quantitative analyses and food systems modeling) as well as assessing impacts ex-post to ensure learning and corrective measures. Taking a food systems approach that draws on expertise and evidence from different research disciplines is necessary to understand how investments and choices in food production, distribution, processing, and consumption determine outcomes related to nutrition, food security, socio-economic welfare, and environmental health. The conference demonstrated that high quality evidence is available even if there are still important gaps that need to be filled. The human and organizational capacity to generate evidence and innovation is also available if we can mobilize the financial resources and regional collaboration to address them. Of course, we must also use evidence to accelerate positive change. This is an important part of the “call to action” of this conference.