The members have focused on selected political entry points to support the achievement of SDG2. By facilitating direct exchange and information sharing, the Platform enables its members to coordinate their development assistance. This coordination led to the founding of the “50 by 2030 Initiative,” a commitment to produce the largest-ever collection of data for agricultural development across 50 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America by 2030, launched at a side event of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in September 2018.

Another action area of our members is the partnership Ceres2030, to develop a cost estimate for achieving SDG 2.3 and 2.4 by 2030 alongside a synthesis of published research on eight research questions focused on agricultural interventions. The research synthesis progresses in parallel and iteratively with the work on the cost modelling, which represents one of the strengths of the Ceres2030 approach. The project’s results are to be published in June 2020 as a collection with Nature Research journals.

A further initiative of our members has been to collaborate on an inventory and analysis donor agencies’ reporting on SDG2 indicators and the results achieved by their funding. The study contributes to better understanding and insights in global progress with regard to SDG2 results and identifies possible opportunities in the global alignment and coordination amongst the Platform members.

While agriculture, food and nutritional security should remain a major focus of attention, world leaders increasingly realize the complexity of the challenges. Nurturing a sustainable future requires major transformations across issues and sectors, which can achieved only be building bridges between disciplines, people, and territories. The recognition of this challenge is one of the contributing factors to the increased focus on a holistic, sustainable food systems approach and ultimately in the decision of the United Nations to hold a Food Systems Summit in 2021 to help stakeholders understand and manage the complex choices that affect the future of food systems within the context of the 2030 Agenda and to meet the challenges of climate change, natural resource degradation, malnutrition and poverty.

The Platform’s members are committed to support the success of the Food Systems Summit and are able build on the common consensus of the challenges and possible solutions they have developed together. In January 2020, Platform members convened an informal meeting with a broader circle of stakeholders to outline necessary steps on the road to the summit and explore what must constitute a common narrative for achieving the SDG2 objective of zero-hunger.