Posted on January, 26, 2022 at 09:33 am
For the past 60 years, a series of agricultural innovations have helped feed the world. New varieties of staple crops produced high yields. New fertilizers encouraged crop health. And improved agronomic methods helped farmers make the most of their resources. These new tools and practices became foundational to the production of agriculture in the U.S. and around the world, enabling marked increases in output and important reductions in rural poverty.
But that productivity-centric model is no longer meeting global needs. Over the past decade, hunger has once again started to rise, bringing with it doubts about our long-term ability to nourish the world’s population, which is projected to reach 10 billion by 2050. The pandemic only worsened these trends. Today, around one-tenth of the planet—some 811 million people—is undernourished.
It’s also clear now that the challenge is greater than producing more food to end hunger. The same innovations that made staple crops so cheap and widely available also popularized diets that tend to cause obesity and other preventable diseases. And we now know that many of these new agricultural practices contribute to climate change and damage the environment.
Luckily, last year brought some signs that the international community is ready to think about the bigger picture. The most significant was the United Nations’ Food Systems Summit, or UNFSS, in September, which marked a breakthrough conceptual shift toward a food systems approach that considers not just agricultural production, but the expanded array of activities, actors and organizations involved in processing, transporting and consuming food—and all of their negative externalities. With this new framework, the summit sought to break down the analytical and political silos that have held back more holistic considerations of the food system’s impacts on the environment, climate change and health, in addition to hunger.
With that precedent set, there is much work to be done. In the past several years, a rising tide of research and innovations from a diverse set of public and private actors has offered new ideas on how the world might take its first steps toward transforming food systems. Another promising sign has been the accelerating trend toward more inclusive leadership in food systems policymaking, as well as the broader civil society and private sector participation in generating momentum, political pressure and investment.
Transforming food systems will be essential for the U.N. to make progress on its highest priority commitments, like its climate change targets and Sustainable Development Goals. In the coming year and beyond, those interested in climate, development and health will also need to double down on the food systems approach by investing in transformative solutions—and by backing them up with bold, forward-looking policies.
The flaws in our current food systems have serious impacts ranging from the level of the individual to the planetary. As it is, they simply do not provide an adequate variety of affordable, safe and nutrient-dense foods, and the consequences for human health have been clear. As of 2017, 40 percent of the world’s population—3 billion people—could not afford even the cheapest healthy diet. In high- and low-income countries alike, consumer food preferences have shifted toward highly processed foods and sugar-sweetened beverages, and in higher-income groups, the overconsumption of animal-source foods like meat, eggs and dairy products has been linked to cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other diet-related diseases.
In fact, in most countries around the world, poor diet is now the leading risk factor for death. Nevertheless, research on nutrition has remained wholly underfunded and siloed from broader health and agriculture research. The U.S. is a case in point. Federal funding for nutrition research at the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture has not grown for 30 years, and these budgets are dwarfed by spending on diseases like cancer. In 2018, the NIH invested just $1.8 billion in nutrition research, less than 5 percent of its budget, while the USDA spent $88 million, or 7 percent of its budget. The latter has spent 13 times more money on research to improve agricultural productivity than it has on researching the impact of diets on human health.
Another U.N. summit in 2021, the Nutrition for Growth Summit in Tokyo, known as N4G, responded to these trends by recognizing the key role of food systems in addressing malnutrition. The event’s leaders identified “building food systems that promote healthy diets and nutrition” as one of its three areas of focus, and pledged continued collaboration with leaders of the UNFSS—which also prioritized nutrition in its programming—on “transform[ing] health, food, and social systems,” in a joint statement released in September.
In the coming year, those interested in climate, development and health will also need to double down on the food systems approach.
Food systems are also affected by climate change. Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall and increasing droughts and floods are already decreasing crop yields, threatening the already insufficient livelihoods of the world’s poor, more than 80 percent of whom live in rural areas and work in agriculture. Extreme weather and increasing climate variability are also exacerbating conflict and migration trends, further undermining progress on food and economic security. And the coronavirus pandemic has set development back even further, having already erased four years of global progress on poverty reduction.
In turn, our current global food systems worsen environmental degradation and climate change. Globally, agriculture and other food system activities account for roughly 70 percent of global fresh water use each year, one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions and up to 80 percent of biodiversity loss. The inefficient use of inorganic fertilizers causes nitrate and phosphate runoff, leading to red tides and creating dead zones in rivers and oceans; in fact, about half of the 120 million tons of nitrogen fertilizers used annually ends up in waterways. Overall, it’s become clear that agriculture’s consumption of natural resources has pushed beyond the limits of planetary sustainability.
The UNFSS took great pains to tackle the links between agriculture, climate change, environmental sustainability and poverty, devoting three of the event’s five action tracks to related topics: “sustainable consumption patterns,” “nature-positive production” and “resilience to vulnerabilities, shocks and stress.” Participants spent the full year leading up to the event dissecting each of these trends, assessing science-based evidence, reviewing emerging innovations and incubating action-oriented, multistakeholder initiatives to address them.
Yet food system discussions were largely absent from the U.N.’s climate change summit in November, known as COP26, despite loud calls from UNFSS leaders to better connect the two events’ agendas. That was an important missed opportunity, given the high profile of COP26 and the critical importance of slowing climate change, giving rise to concerns that policymakers won’t devote the attention and resources desperately needed to spark major food system changes.
Achieving progress on transforming food systems at the policy level—global, regional and national—can seem daunting and achingly slow. Science and innovation, though, are moving ahead, and part of the work of the UNFSS was to highlight and support the most promising projects. Many investments from years or decades ago in exploratory research are now bearing fruit; some have already been widely adopted by farmers around the world. The challenge now is to maintain support for promising new research, while taking the innovations that are working to scale.
Some of these innovations seek to improve the nutritional value of food itself. For instance, biofortification uses modern biotechnology and older breeding techniques to increase micronutrients like zinc, iron and Vitamin A in common crops like corn, beans and rice. Other science-based tools include industrial fortification to make staple foods, like breakfast cereals and flours, healthier; reformulating production processes and recipes to eliminate trans-fatty acids and reduce saturated fat, sugars or salt; and expanding the use of nutritious aquatic foods, like dried fish powder, in soups and dried mixes to boost their protein content.
Other science-based solutions would address soil degradation, which is now recognized as an increasingly urgent climate change issue. Improving the soil on existing acreage would deter farmers from clearing new lands, preserving forests that today act as carbon sinks. Many well-known technologies to improve soil quality—such as no-till, integrated soil management using compost, cover crops, cattle and agroforestry—fell out of favor in the past because they are labor-intensive, but they are now making a comeback due to the connection between soil depletion and declining yields, incomes and nutrition. At the same time, new and advanced technologies have made it easier to measure the amount of carbon in soil, making it possible for governments to pay farmers to store carbon in their soils as an “ecosystem service.”
Meanwhile, scientific techniques that are already in use could be scaled up and further adapted to improve the climate resilience of food systems. In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, scientists have developed drought-tolerant maize varieties that are already stabilizing production during dry spells. Some new maize varieties have been designed to tolerate multiple climate stressors—like heat, drought and insects—and are biofortified with Vitamin A and zinc, while others are being further adapted to include resistance to the new pests emerging because of climate change, like the fall armyworm in sub-Saharan Africa. These techniques have also been used on other vital crops, including, for instance, the development of submergence-tolerant rice.
Finally, advances in digital technology and data—including the rapid spread of cellular networks and phones—are already helping farmers, herders and small business owners adapt to changing food system conditions and create new markets for their products. For instance, it is already much easier for them to access weather information, business advice, financial services and markets that were previously unavailable or prohibitively expensive. In East Africa, an app for livestock herders offers advice on how to respond to changing weather and pasture conditions, while in India, digital platforms like DeHaat and Animall are transforming smallholder agriculture.
Scientific advances are critically important, but transforming global, regional and national food systems will also require the support of government policies. Policies exert a powerful influence on the types of crops and livestock that farmers choose to raise, the investments made by the private sector, how and where food is transported and traded, and ultimately on the diversity, quality and price of food made available to consumers.
In a recent report, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that governments provide $540 billion in support to agriculture businesses each year—and that 90 percent of the subsidies go to practices that are damaging to the environment and human health. Globally, the largest share goes to commodities that produce large amounts of emissions, including beef, milk, rice and sugar. Since they are subsidized, these products are relatively cheaper than healthier foods, like fruits and vegetables, which are generally not subsidized.
The report therefore argues for governments to redirect agricultural subsidies to help catalyze the transition to healthier and more environmentally sustainable food systems. That might include investing in infrastructure to improve access to healthier foods and their affordability—especially for nutritious but highly perishable fruits and vegetables; for instance, governments could offer subsidies for irrigation systems that are more water-efficient, or for innovative solar-powered cooling units. And rather than subsidizing the production of specific commodities like beef and milk, the government could support the same farmers in diversifying their products and revenue streams.
Scientific advances are critically important, but transforming global, regional and national food systems will also require the support of government policies.
However, executing such a major policy shift will be an enormous challenge, not just because it will likely encounter resistance from the beneficiaries of current subsidy regimes, but because the need for transforming food systems is so poorly understood by the public and government officials alike. A major challenge, then, will be to uncover the hidden costs of the current food systems—such as their impact on health and the environment—which are not reflected in market prices. The hidden benefits of sustainability, like the ecosystem services farmers could provide by improving soil health and water quality, are also not well-reflected in market prices.
One of the interesting new initiatives to come out of UNFSS was the True Value of Food Initiative, in which a community of experts and partners will help national governments create greater transparency around the costs and benefits of their food systems. Beyond that, the initiative will evaluate the potential impacts and trade-offs of different policy options, giving governments essential support as they shape more sustainable, equitable and healthier food systems.
Shifting consumer preferences away from unhealthy ultra-processed, sugary, salty foods around the world will be another key policy challenge. In his book, “Resetting the Table,” Harvard policy researcher Rob Paarlberg points a finger at corporate scientists and marketing experts, who have excelled at creating a “food swamp” of irresistible, affordable food products and promoting their over-consumption. Large companies have become the main promoters of the kind of excessive, unhealthy eating that leads to obesity and chronic diet-related disease, Paarlberg writes, so public health initiatives will need to rein them in.
Governments could consider policies and regulations that would hold the food industry accountable for producing and marketing healthier products. They could also issue guidelines that would make food labels more transparent, consistent and easy-to-understand. And they could place a renewed emphasis on healthy foods in government initiatives, including social safety net programs, humanitarian aid and meal programs in schools, the military and hospitals, all of which would increase consumer exposure and demand for healthy foods and boost the market for food producers. As the Brookings Institution’s Homi Kharas asked in November, if people accepted taxes on cigarettes as a policy tool to reduce smoking, why can’t they be persuaded to accept one on high-carbon, unhealthy foods like meat?
The coronavirus pandemic, with its impact on hunger and poverty, has made this transformation more necessary than ever. But the pandemic also affected the dynamic of participation in the UNFSS—in a good way. As travel restrictions prompted a shift to virtual meetings, what emerged was a more inclusive process to prepare for the summit. Individuals and organizations—including, importantly, women, youth and Indigenous leaders—that would not ordinarily have been able to participate in a high-level U.N. gathering were active participants at UNFSS. In the end, tens of thousands convened to tackle food system transformation from the local level to the global.
The increased focus on active participation by local leaders and groups is well-timed, too, because over the past several years, a new wave of influencers—including chefs, small businesses, women and youth—have been taking action to educate consumers and demand recognition and fair pay, as well as to stimulate demand for healthier foods. Take, for instance, the Chefs’ Manifesto network, a community of more than 1,000 chefs from 90 countries who are cooperating to promote healthier food. Members include a Bolivian restaurant that is training young chefs to value Bolivia’s food heritage, as well as a Bulgarian restaurant that has committed to producing zero waste, employs underprivileged youth and uses 95 percent locally grown food.
This is the way forward: multistakeholder partnerships, locally adapted solutions and local leadership. Food systems are geographically and culturally specific, so local dialogues, leaders and organizations have much to offer in remaking them. In preparation for the UNFSS, emerging leaders took the initiative in organizing discussions, growing comfortable with taking charge of the proceedings. Governments also convened national dialogues in 148 countries, consulting small and large businesses, communities and civil society as they began designing national transformation plans, with help from young people, women and Indigenous communities.
All of these preparations produced more than 2,200 ideas on actions that individuals, governments and international bodies can take, and inspired 1,000 additional independent dialogues by the end of 2021. By the time the summit convened in September, like-minded countries and multistakeholder partners had developed a long list of diverse initiatives and commitments, which have continued to evolve in the months since.
Time will tell whether the efforts of the UNFSS will catalyze a decisive shift toward a food systems framework for change. There are hopeful signs that political leaders, scientists and some private sector companies are taking the summit’s call to action seriously. Still, the threats we face on food security, human health, livelihoods and environmental sustainability are daunting, and there is much left to do.
Source: World Politics Review