Just prior to the Rome meeting the new Milan Pact Steering Committee cities were announced, with the election of 13 cities. The Steering committee elected Milan to be the president of the Steering Committee which will remain in place for two years.

The Technical Workshop on 13 October began with the presentation of the preliminary results of two surveys to signatory cities. The purposes of the surveys were to see what priorities of cities may shape the development of indicators and the availability of data to measure progress in implementation of the Pact.

A discussion of networks at global, national and local levels ensued, with input from C40, Eurocities, the European regional office of ICLEI, the Italian healthy cities network (Cittasane), francophone African cities, the US Conference of Mayors’ urban food policy directors task force and a Dutch network of cities.

One important discovery is that in existing networks at all scales, working groups including Milan Pact cities and other cities interested in the food policy issues as presented by the Pact have been initiated (e.g. C40, Eurocities, US Conference of Mayors,). In emerging networks Milan Pact cities have been at the forefront and non-signatory cities are included in these organizing efforts as well (e.g. African cities, Dutch network, Healthy Cities network).

The final part of the workshop was a presentation by FAO of technical peer-to-peer cooperation and exchange of practices drawing from past city-to-city exchange in the technical cooperation programme.

On October 14, World Food Day, the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact Mayors Summit occurred after the official World Food Day ceremony hosted by FAO. The FAO Director General opened the summit referencing links of the Mayors Pact to ending hunger, fighting climate change and to the implementation of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. Supporting statements were made by Mayor Sala of Milan and representatives of the Italian Food and Agriculture Ministry and the City of Rome. Keynote addresses and a mayors debate brought out the many challenges and opportunities presented by efforts to implement the Pact.

The final part of the summit saw presentation of awards to 8 cities that were scored the highest among 53 submissions from 33 cities. The 6 special mention awards in the categories of the Framework for Action were presented to:

• Quito for food production
• Birmingham for sustainable diets and nutrition
• Riga for food waste
• Lusaka for social and economic equity
• Toronto for food supply and distribution
• Vancouver for governance

The 2 monetary awards for the highest score and challenging environment were presented to:

• Mexico City for the highest score within a challenging environment
• Baltimore for the overall highest score

All eight cities made presentations in the form of slides or video that will be shared on the Milan Pact website

The next city for the third annual Mayors Summit will be Valencia Spain in 2017.

ISLE is an association which was created in June 2012 to continue with the work carried out during a EU-funded Erasmus Networks project (2010-2013) which involved 39 partners from 30 European countries interested in fostering and transferring innovation concerning the concept of Sustainable development in the teaching of Life Sciences.
Consequently, the ISLE Network members are predominantly International Higher Education Institutions specialized in Agriculture and Food. They have been working on sustainability issues since 2010 and therefore, it was a natural choice to combine efforts on how to profoundly change the current paradigm of Sustainable Food Systems using interdisciplinary teaching, research and students in selected universities on one side and the expert professional experience of Pubic Food Service in Eating City on the other.
And what better way than to use the main link that exists between ISLE and Eating City: the training of future decision–makers in Higher education as a lever of change.
However, knowing that sustainable development can only be achieved through collective decisions, Higher Education must not neglect to work with entrepreneurs and elected representatives in order to make that change.
In fact, as the Coordinator of the ISLE funded project at the time, I had already learnt about the Eating City Platform as early as 2011 during one of the Consortium meeting in Italy and I was intrigued to find out more. Of course, working with and in Higher Education, I was also curious to know how Eating City was able to attract more than 25 young people (all from different backgrounds, but all concerned by better food systems) each year to attend a “Summer Campus” for more than 10 days to share their vision of public food services in cities worldwide!
Being unable to attend the 2015 edition, I was very excited to be able to travel in August this year to their annual venue, the beautiful “Bergerie de Villarceaux”, a sustainable eco-centre situated 60 kms from Paris with its on-site accommodation, restaurant and own organic farm.
Coming from a more academic professional background, it was interesting for me to see the model set-up used by Eating City to exploit cross-fertilization during their summer camp. All the participants and speakers were able to stay on site together for the whole camp which automatically created a wonderful melting pot of ideas and opinions, not to mention friendships. In between collaborative rapid-fire speakers, all addressing a different side of food systems sustainability were “Food Thinkers” and “Food Lab” sessions. These focused on the main points of the presentations and enabled the participants to put all their energy and creativity into contributing to the writing of a final text called the 4th “Villarceaux Declaration”: the final deliverable of the Summer Camp.
I am therefore, in my current role as the President of ISLE, very honoured to be an integral part of this new collaboration and am looking forward to the outcomes of the actions that ISLE and Eating City, together with our respective partners, will carry out in the near future.
Our first objective is to apply the Eating City Methodology to Higher Education and for the younger generations who wish to change the paradigm for sustainable food systems: the organisation of a “decentralised” Eating City Summer School, based on the same methods of the campus but with different selection process, to be held at the University of Teramo, Italy in 2017, is currently underway.

There is no doubt about our current food system’s unsustainability, but in absence of a consensual scenario, world leaders are still tempted to foster economic levers to the detriment of environmental aspects. The Milan Urban Food Policy Pact’ s ratification by more than 133 cities worldwide highlights the will of cities to play a role in new cooperation models: urban centers are now home to half of the global population and they, strategically, bridge local and global interests. A flourishing context of innovative practices related to agriculture diversification, rural tourism and alternative food systems is echoed in the growing number of urban agriculture projects that transform cities in creative social spaces, where new solutions bringing significant improvement to sustainable food systems are designed and experienced (Schiff, 2013).

Such cultural effervescence must not overshadow the traditional competence of public food procurement as a leverage for the shift of paradigm.

Today, 40% of calories are consumed out of home. The total social foodservice market of all Member States in EU-28 was valued €82 billion in 2013 (GIRA Foodservice, 2014). This is low compared to the 1.048 billions of euro of the annual turnover of the whole european food and beverage industry (Fooddrink Europe, 2014), but certainly relevant to give a significant signal. By experiencing that an in depth “cooking from scratch” re-engineering approach is propedeutical to high quality public meals, several pionniers have already paved the way to re-qualify Public Food Service (PFS) (Lacourt and Mariani, 2015). An effort is now needed to broaden the interest and attractiveness of cities for such a competence that is still too often outsourced at the lowest price.

Starting from the definition of a specific activity code to assess properly the economic weight of an activity that equals to 21 billions of meals served every year in EU. Acknowledging the potential impact of exemplarity to promote food education, social inclusion, local economy and to contrast the hidden costs of food waste and patients malnutrition in hospitals, not forgetting that public food services provides food on a daily basis to one european citizen every six. Therefore, the economic lever of public procurement seems appropriate to create suitable market conditions for more sustainable food systems and in the meantime it fosters local authorities’s authoritativeness and efficiency to raise population awareness and promote synergies with civil society in the emergence of more sustainable food production and consumption patterns.

Schiff, R. (2013). The Role of Food Policy Councils in Developing Sustainable Food Systems. Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition, 3(2-3): 206-228>

GIRA Foodservice, (2014), The Contract Catering Market in Europe 2009 – 2014 – 15 counties, for FoodServiceEurope, October 2014

Fooddrink Europe, (2014) Data & Trends of the European Food and Drink Industry 2013-2014.

Lacourt, I., Mariani, M. (2015). City Food Policies. Securing our daily bread in an urbanizing world. Le Château edizioni, Aosta. 176 p. ISBN 978-88-7637-186-8

Nowadays in Italy many discussions around food and food systems are having place with the participation of social movements, academia and public authorities.

During the WFTP the most remarkable element, and the core of the event, was the participation of small-scale farmers from all around the world. Through conferences, lectures, workshops and seminars they provided their perspectives on the debates around food systems sustainability – most of them addressed by the Villarceaux Declaration 2015 – such as land grabbing, food and education, food and religion and food as commons, among others. In this way the Slow Food movement has succeeded on providing voice worldwide to the traditional producers from the ‘developing’ world who for centuries have been practitioners of the “slow” way of producing food and whose knowledge and experience are in danger as a result of the industrial – and (neo)colonized- model of food provision.

Few days later, the AESOP Conference 2015 showed another approach to the food issue. Scholars, researchers and practitioners of food policy gathered to share and debate on models, instruments and experiences that improve the systems of food production and provision, considering the urban-rural linkages and the three dimensions of sustainability. The attendees, from different countries and backgrounds, had the chance to compare several strategies used in different cities worldwide and to identify similar opportunities and threats. For instance, cases of urban agriculture in cities such as Shanghai, Perugia, Detroit and Santa Cruz were presented, allowing the participants to identify complementarity and particularities of models with different aims: food security, green spaces conservation and quality air, inclusion and social fabric, therapeutic farming, etc.

Last but not least, during the LED Forum different panels were dealing with food issues. Local, regional and national authorities gathered with representatives of NGO’s and international organizations to talk about the challenges and strategies of the public agendas to improve food systems. While some speeches got stuck in the politically correct discourse, some others really introduced good practices. Besides the renowned Milan Food Policy, there were remarkable initiatives such as the family farming and short trade circuits policy from the province of Antioquia (MANA plan); and from the third sector, the solidarity economy networks for food exchange in Curitiba.

After this brief approach, it can be concluded that efforts are being done from diverse actors in order to further discuss food. However, the integration of all the actors mentioned is not complete at all and sometimes the distance between discourse and practice could seem broad.

What if small-scale farmers are invited to the academic and public debates? What if decision-makers are brought to events such as WFTP? Let’s keep the debate open!