It’s Time To Fix The Broken Food System
This week, the countries of the United Nations will sign the most important document they have ever produced. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide an unprecedented roadmap for world development that may just transform our future.
New York is crowded with people with the best intentions. Hopes are high. The Goals’ predecessors, the MDGs (signed in 2000) halved the number of those in extreme poverty, dramatically reduced the child mortality rate and increased access to clean drinking water to over 90% of the global population. Bill Gates called the goals “the best idea for focusing the world on fighting global poverty that I’ve ever seen.”
So we are looking at a momentous opportunity — but also a huge risk. That risk is that despite the good intentions, the endless discussions, break-out meetings and high-level panels, policymakers will overlook the silver bullet that runs through everything they want to achieve.
That silver bullet? Fixing the global food system. The damage this system wreaks is shocking.
Today, 30% of all the food we produce goes to waste. Tonight, almost 800m people will go to bed hungry. Yet tomorrow, 2bn people will wake up overweight. Chronic diseases — diabetes, heart diseases, stokes and cancers — have overtaken smoking as the world’s biggest killers. More children are living to the age of 5 than ever before — yet more children than ever before are set for a lifetime of diabetes by the age of 9.
The world is stuck in a sick state between unhealthy feast and famine — and the financial toll is huge. Chronic diseases cost the global economy 4% of GDP a year. The NHS already spends more than £14bn annually on diabetes alone.
Then there is the cost to the planet. The global agricultural system is one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, the largest consumer of freshwater, the largest cause of land degradation, loss of biodiversity and deforestation.
It’s a toxic, vicious cycle. The production of food causes climate change. Climate change threatens floods, droughts and scarcity. In turn, they threaten food security. And repeat.
All this drives massive geopolitical turbulence. Look back on the most tumultuous events of recent years and you can see food running through them. Worldwide spikes of grain prices in 2007–08 were one of the drivers of the Arab Spring. Mubarak’s fall in Egypt was preceded by a 23% increase in household food insecurity. Syria’s civil war sparked after a devastating 4-year drought left 800,000 farmers out of work.
This is why we call fixing the global food system the silver bullet. It is the common denominator running through all the challenges we are trying to tackle with these SDGs: hunger, poverty, climate change and ecosystem degradation.
Yet food is rarely considered when we seek solutions to climate change, global conflict or the future of our planet. At sustainability conferences you will hear loud debates about the future of the energy and transport sectors — but never food.
We are missing this critical nexus between food and sustainability, and the danger is that we are setting ourselves up for a great global mistake. These SDGs could set the worldwide development community marching off in the direction of abolishing hunger — but if we set about that task using the same dirty, polluting, unsustainable food production methods as today, if we learn nothing of how poor diets are killing people in the West, then we will simply create new problems in developing countries.
Our perspective has to be wider. The challenge is to feed 9 billion people healthy diets by 2050 — within the planetary boundaries that set a safe operating space on Earth.
We believe this can be done. Healthier, more sustainable diets can feed more people and reduce environmental costs. They require fewer animal proteins and more plant-based foods. Enough food is already produced to feed the entire planet. Food innovations are progressing at a remarkable rate. Industry is working out smart ways to increase production without destroying the environment.
Nutritionists, scientists, governments, policymakers and business are often all pulling in the same direction — but the trouble is they are pulling in separate silos. We need to get much better at working together, across disciplines, across nations, to make progress on diets that are healthy for people and planet.
But for progress to be made, you need to know how to measure it. That is why the EAT Initiative, together with the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) & the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), has developed a set of indicators that allows us to understand the relationship between food production and sustainability.
In addition, the EAT initiative is launching a global database that will hold vital information on the state of the food system. The role of this initiative is to pull people together from different disciplines. The scientists with the diagnostic of risks and solutions, the politicians with the power, the business with the innovative power and reach across the world, in every farm, in every supermarket and every kitchen. With the right data, we can make this communication meaningful.
So our message to the great, good and well-intentioned at the UN this week is: wake up. Let’s not create a new mess while clearing up the old ones. Stop missing the vital link that is the global food system. Start thinking differently about how we approach development and food: seeing them as part of the same complex, totally intertwined challenge.
There will never be a better time to make this change than through these new Development Goals. Let’s seize this unique opportunity — and place fixing our broken food system at the top of the global to-do list.
Co-written by:
Gunhild Stordalen, MD/PhD, Director, EAT Initiative / EAT Stockholm Food Forum
Prof. Johan Rockström, Director Stockholm Resilience Centre, Chair Earth League, Chair CGIAR Program on Water, Land, Ecosystems
