The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) now provides free access to a global library housing detailed The FAPDA platform allows countries to share policies and actions and to rapidly search for ideas from their peers. Source: FAOinformation on how different countries are acting to keep food supply chains moving during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The agency has already established guidelines to ensure supply chains remain open, and providing access to the revamped Food and Agriculture Policy Decision Analysis (FAPDA) database will enable member states to share and discover best practices implemented by their peers. FAPDA was launched to collect national food security policy decisions in the wake of the global food price crises of 2008 and currently offers over 10,000 policy decisions and 2,000 national policy frameworks from 100 countries. The database now includes a new section that maps current official decisions being taken around the world to mitigate the impacts of the pandemic on food and agricultural systems.

The platform can be searched according to country, targets such as consumers or producers, and themes including nutrition, tax or natural resource management. It also indicates the date and legal stage attained by the various measures, and offers an easy-to-use module to submit a new policy action, which will be added to the database after validation by the FAPDA team.