Sustainable Food

The Joint Office for Sustainable Food (OCAS) has been awarded the prestigious 2024 Regional Best Practices Award by ORU Fogar as part of the 5th Zero Hunger Summit. This accolade highlights the OCAS’s commitment to efficient, innovative public management, as well as its contribution to food security and sustainability.

The ORU Fogar awards 

ORU Fogar is an international organisation that brings together governments from all over the world. Its main mission is to strengthen the role of regions in global governance and promote sustainable development. The Regional Best Practices Awards, organised by ORU Fogar, seek to identify and bring visibility to successful initiatives by regional governments that contribute to improving citizens’ lives.

The 5th Zero Hunger Summit

Until Friday 4 October, the 5th Zero Hunger Summit, organised jointly by the Government of Catalonia and ORU Fogar, will bring together regional leaders, internationally renowned experts on the matter and organisations from all over the world to address the challenges of nutrition and food security and sovereignty. During the summit, the Poblenou Campus of Pompeu Fabra University will host a range of activities, including lectures, workshops, panel discussions and interviews with the goal of sharing experiences, knowledge and best practices.

The summit revolves around the fight against hunger, which still affects 800 million people all over the world. The three main strands organising the content are climate change, with a particular emphasis on drought and its effects on agriculture; preventing food loss and waste; and the importance of gastronomy. Within the latter, the programme ‘Catalonia: 2025 World Region of Gastronomy’ will be presented.

The Joint Office for Sustainable Food (OCAS)

The OCAS is an initiative promoted by the Government of Catalonia (specifically the Catalan Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fishing and Food plus Prodeca, a public corporation affiliated with the Ministry), the Barcelona City Council (sustainable food section) and the Barcelona Metropolitan Strategic Plan (Healthy Food Mission of the Metropolitan Commitment 2030). It is a unique pressure stemming from the joint efforts of the public administrations, which have joined forces to transform the food system into a more sustainable model by introducing this approach in projects developed as part of the Strategic Food Plan for Catalonia 2021-2026, the Barcelona 2030 Healthy and Sustainable Food Strategy and the Metropolitan Region Food Charter. 

In OCAS’s first year, 23 project were promoted that correspond to the office’s lines of action: sustainable food systems; commercialisation and local producers’ network; urban/rural connection through food; food education; the right to access sustainable food; communication and the story of sustainable food; and regulatory framework and public procurement.

Beyond the office’s goal, the project has also had intangible benefits such as a cooperative work culture and boosting shared knowledge and trust among teams. It has fostered an understanding of each institution’s internal processes, which enables better coordination and adaptation to different paces of work. In parallel, structural tools have been developed such as the corporate image, communication protocols and coordination instruments to facilitate joint work.

The implications of the award

The ORU Fogar awards highlight the power of the world’s regions, which have a strong ability to identify their citizens’ problems and challenges; indeed, this underlies the power of these awards, as the organisation’s jury stated.

Recognition of the OCAS with an award like this one reinforces its positioning as a benchmark in sustainable food matters and efficient public management. In the words of Lidón Martrat, the OCAS coordinator, receiving an award for best practices ‘highlights the political will and effort of the institutions’ technical teams to generate this instrument of shared governance and helps us to continue learning about what it means to work in a cross-cutting, multilevel way across different institutions’. An award like this one will certainly help to bring the institutions’ joint initiative more visibility and encourage its replicability in other regions.

In addition to the Joint Office for Sustainable Food, the other best practices that were given awards were the government of Catalonia’s project to promote the universality of reusable menstrual products ‘My period, my rules’; the Comprehensive Centre for Men in Situations of Violence of the government of the Province of Córdoba (Argentina); the project to transform data into effective development actions -Local Information System in Manabí as a Smart Region- of the Autonomous Decentralised Provincial Government of Manabí (Ecuador); and the project ‘For All Women: The Place and Power of Women in Politics’, by the State of Pará (Brazil).