Why we need a global food transition
THE NEW INSTITUTE | Julia Gaes
report
report
Why we need a global food transition
At our pre-conference event for the Hamburg Sustainability Conference, we emphasized the interconnectedness of food systems with climate change and biodiversity loss, and called for more ambitious structural changes rather than incremental adjustments. Read more about three approaches to making food systems better for people and our planet.
IDEAS
On Sunday, October 6th, we hosted an event on these and other pressing issues as a prelude to the first Hamburg Sustainability Conference. With more than 70 external guests in attendance, we addressed the interconnected challenges of global food systems, climate change, and biodiversity through contributions from our fellows and a panel discussion with experts from the international organizations UNDP and the World Food Programme.
The big question: How can we scale up food system transformation on a global scale?
Jump straight to our three key takeaways.
Food production and consumption are major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for about one-third of global emissions. At the same time, the world faces the paradoxical challenge that more than 1 billion people globally are obese while 2.3 billion are undernourished. Food waste is another major problem, with one-third of the food produced globally lost at various stages of production and consumption.
New insights into these problems was provided by three of our fellows, Jessica Duncan and Sayed Azam-Ali from the “The Future of Food” program, and the program chair of our “Planetary Governance” program, Maja Groff.
"We need to take gender very seriously and address the structural impacts of gender inequality, because our future depends on it."
Jessica Duncan, a scholar and educator committed to social-ecological justice, is an associate professor in the politics of food system change at the Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen University (The Netherlands). In her presentation, Duncan highlighted the disproportionate impact of climate change on women, noting that a 1°C increase in average temperatures reduces the income of female-headed households by 34% compared to male households. "When it comes to policy and governance, gender is often ignored and women are portrayed as a separate, marginalized demographic category rather than active agents," she said. Highlighting the fact that only 1.7% of tracked climate finance in 2018 reached smallholder producers, Jessica called for gender transformative approaches to agriculture and climate policy.
"We need to reimagine our food system."
Sayed Azam-Ali, CEO of Crops for the Future, discussed the limited diversity in the global food system, with just four crops (wheat, rice, soy, corn) providing 60% of the global calories in the human diet.
Sayed stressed the need to explore the potential of 7,000 underutilized crops to diversify and transform the global food system, making it more sustainable and climate resilient. He also highlighted a global knowledge system called CropBASE, which provides information on 2,700 crops grown worldwide, and can help identify potential crops for specific locations based on various factors, including nutritional content and climate resilience.
Maja Groff, convener of the Climate Governance Commission, highlighted the interlinkages between food systems, climate change, and biodiversity. Despite the significant role food systems play in climate change and biodiversity loss, governance approaches remain siloed, with only five out of 100 countries addressing consumption in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) as outlined in the Paris Agreement. Groff called for a holistic view of food systems, including practices such as regenerative agriculture, and emphasized the importance of grassroots initiatives.
PANEL
In a subsequent panel discussion, three experts in the field – Achim Steiner, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Martin Frick, Director of the World Food Programme (Berlin), and our program chair José Luis Chicoma – commented on the issues raised by our fellows and opened the discussion to the audience.
“Farmers are entrenched in an agricultural economy that makes them try to survive in a market economy, rather than reward them for their custodianship of the world's ability to grow food and feed it.”
Achim Steiner emphasized the urgent need for systemic change in our approach to agriculture and food production. He pointed to the absurd reality of significant food waste and the detrimental environmental impacts of producing food that is not consumed, as well as the challenge of malnutrition facing millions of people. Steiner argued that we need to focus on empowering farmers, investing in nature-based solutions such as perennial crops, and shifting our mindset from a consumer-driven model to one that recognizes the interconnectedness of environmental responsibility and agricultural viability: "We treat the challenge of feeding the world as essentially a consumer product outcome pipeline, rather than understanding that there is an entire economy around which farmers are trying to survive. We need to ensure that the incentives provided to those who care for our ecological assets, the farmers, actually reflect the costs they incur in sustaining productive ecosystems."
Martin Frick underlined the destructive power dynamics that exist in food systems as well as the fact that smallholder farmers are not really participating in local decision-making. The World Food Programme has a dual mandate: to provide humanitarian aid in emergencies and to address the root causes of hunger. With support from Germany, they have rehabilitated over 300,000 hectares of land using innovative, ancient practices such as rainwater harvesting, while also implementing social protection schemes and ensuring financial inclusion for farmers. But in fragile contexts, where some 62% of beneficiaries live, the challenge is to secure food rights without reliable governance, requiring a participatory approach that includes the voices of farmers' organizations and local communities to maintain stability in the international order.
José Luis Chicoma, a former Minister of Production in Peru and Senior Advisor on Global Food Systems for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), expressed frustration with the slow response of governments to climate challenges, noting that despite ambitious commitments, meaningful change remains elusive.
"A structural change is needed globally to understand that food is not just another commodity.”
He highlighted a contradiction in Peru, where vast fisheries are exploited primarily for profit rather than to address local food insecurity, reflecting a broader problem of prioritizing economic growth over nutrition and environmental sustainability. Chicoma called for a fundamental transformation of governments and democracies to incorporate sustainability and food into their core mandates, and emphasized the need for a new approach to global governance to effectively address these pressing challenges.
TAKE-AWAYS
So, where do we go from here? Here are three promising approaches.
1. Agroecology, the application of ecological principles to agricultural systems and practices, is a promising approach to address climate and biodiversity goals while also improving food security and empowering communities.
For years, climate-smart agriculture has been promoted as a solution to the environmental damage caused by conventional agriculture. But this approach has often led to continued deforestation and biodiversity loss, especially in large-scale monocultures such as soy farming in the Amazon.
Despite claims of sustainability, it has relied heavily on synthetic fertilizers and herbicides. In contrast, agroecology has emerged as a more promising model, drawing on ancestral knowledge and community-based farming systems, such as the 'Three Sisters' system in Mesoamerica, which promotes biodiversity and local food security. José Luis Chicoma mentioned that the potential of agroecology is enormous, but real progress requires structural changes in land tenure and governance. Without addressing deeper issues in democratic and economic systems, agroecology risks being co-opted by the very forces it seeks to challenge.
Agroecology should accelerate progress on many climate and biodiversity goals. But for it to really work, communities must be truly empowered to make their own decisions. This requires a radical shift in the ownership of productive resources. Chicoma explained that this means, for example, promoting land reform, especially in many countries where land ownership is highly concentrated in the hands of a few.
2. We need to change the productivist DNA in governments and democracies – and we need to design a planetary governance for this.
Current governments and democracies are fundamentally designed to prioritize economic growth, particularly through increased production, at the expense of environmental and equity concerns.
This productivist focus, driven by powerful industries and aligned with GDP growth, limits the ability of governments to implement meaningful environmental protections and address social justice issues. The dominance of market mechanisms, particularly in sectors like food, reinforces these priorities, making it difficult to reform subsidies or redirect public finance toward vulnerable populations.
Without significant restructuring and the establishment of planetary governance, governments will fail to prioritize ecosystems and biodiversity, and the most vulnerable will remain unprotected. States should be able to intervene decisively to purchase food from smallholder farmers and distribute it to those who need it most.
3. Climate governance is a gender issue.
Climate change disproportionately affects rural populations, especially the poor, women, and the elderly. Jessica Duncan rightly criticizes superficial "add women and stir" approaches to food systems policy, where simply including the word "women" in documents leads to endorsement without substantive action.
We emphasize the need for gender transformative approaches and strongly support Duncan’s proposal of four key actions: taking gender seriously, adopting strong policies, divesting from industrial agricultural systems, and investing in gender-sensitive, agro-ecologically-based climate change adaptation. Current gender mainstreaming efforts are often too technocratic, focusing on markets and land tenure systems that do not really benefit women.