ISLAMABAD:The experts at a seminar on Friday termed the recently established Pakistan Subnational Food System Dashboard as a problem-solving advanced solution for the policymakers and academia working in the field of agriculture and food security.
The seminar titled, ‘Using Digital Platforms for Sustaining Food Systems’, was organized by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) in collaboration with the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), said a press release issued here.
Speaking on the occasion, Dr Ghulam Sadiq Afridi, Member of Social Sciences, Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC), said though the country had the world’s one of the most diverse and beautiful agricultural landscape, it is ranked eighth globally in farm production.
The establishment of Pakistan’s Subnational Food Systems Dashboard by the Ministry of National Food Security and Research in partnership with the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and housed in the Pakistan Agriculture Research Council
(PARC), is the critical step towards the provision of easy access to the available data.
‘We are going to initiate specific interventions for food system transformation and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Five Action tracks committed by Pakistan to the UN have been completed and all these are interconnected to SDGs,’ he said.
Afridi noted that the food system dashboard was necessary to consult and guide different kinds of reports on nutrition and health, whereas some 226 indicators were covered by the Global Food System dashboard that encompasses key indicators like drivers of the agriculture sector, crosscutting issues, food supply chains, environmental impacts, and the individual factors.
The food system dashboard is easily accessible and interactive with downloadable data, which is beneficial for academia and students, he said, adding that ‘on the global lines, PARC has developed the local food system dashboard.’
Dr Abid Qaiyum Suleri, SDPI Executive Director, said the dashboard would carry subn
ational data across a range of key food system indicators to support national and sub-national level stakeholders with better planning.
While sharing lessons from SDPI’s contribution to the Digital Transformation of the Food System in Pakistan, Dr Suleri said that the Food Security Dashboard aimed to monitor the supply and demand of essential food commodities and the resulting changes in prices, however, it is of no avail unless the data is fed into the system daily.
Earlier, Faiz Rasool, Senior Policy Advisor, GAIN mentioned that the government of Pakistan has acknowledged GAIN’s priority areas and added them to its plan of action.
‘Understanding of the food systems needs to be recognized while refining public policies, and formulation of tools needs to be done for improving food systems,’ he said. The GAIN senior advisor noted that there are data constraints in the realm of food and agriculture systems, whereas the understanding of food systems is a world-over problem.