The need to urgently transition food systems to net-zero, nature-positive that can nourish all people, leaving no one behind is more critical than ever. The COVID-19 pandemic has furthered deepened complex challenges we already face from hunger and nutrition, climate and nature, and societal inequity. Innovation offers a profound opportunity to achieve these transitions and help unlock challenges across food systems.

Facilitation has proved crucial for enabling the interaction of Agricultural Innovation System (AIS) actors to address the target and to innovate. This “Guide on training of facilitators of multi-actor agricultural innovation platform” is aimed at serving facilitators when multi-actor agricultural innovation platforms (MAIPs) are organized. Since MAIPs are still an emerging concept, there are not many cases to refer to.

Innovation has a high potential for increasing productivity and farmers’ income,l and consequently reducing poverty and improving food security. However several tropic al countries lack the resources and capacities to suitably develop their agricultural innovation systems. To address this gap, the g20 established the tropical agriculture platform (tap), a multilateral dynamic facilitation mechanism, which fosters better coherence and greater impact of capacity development for agricultural innova tion systems in tropical countries.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, young entrepreneurs in agrifood systems in sub-Saharan Africa were already facing a number of challenges. The main challenges include limited access to natural resources, finance, technology, knowledge and information, and insufficient participation in policy dialogues and other decision-making processes. The COVID-19 pandemic and its disruptions to agricultural value chains are presenting additional hurdles for these agripreneurs.

In Asia and the Pacific, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is working with member countries to leverage breakthroughs in information and communication technologies (ICT) to fight hunger, improve nutrition and counter the effects of climate change and extreme weather events that can devastate farmers and their crops. In the Philippines, a country prone to typhoons, aerial drones are taking to the sky to map out at-risk areas of agricultural land to mitigate risk. This innovative practice is also able to quickly assess damages when a disaster strikes.

Scientific advances, technical innovations and application of digital technology have the potential to contribute to a wide-scale structural transformation of food systems. In food safety and process control, as in other areas, technical advances outpace the understanding of how to use these tools to their greatest advantage and how they should be regulated. This thematic brief for the First FAO/WHO/AU International Food Safety Conference outlines key issues - strategic direction of science and innovation in food systems.

Ever since the Asilomar Conference on ‘Recombinant DNA' in February 1975, regulatory policies relating to recombinant DNA technology have focused on the idea that this technology implies threats to human health and the environment [1].