Jessica Fanzo, PhD

Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Global Food Policy and Ethics, John Hopkins University

Food Systems Transformation: Possible, But Not Without Challenges

In the context of the broad global trends of population growth, climate crisis and unhealthy diets, food available for consumption will need to increase by more than 50 percent to meet the food security and nutritional needs of the world’s population in 2050. Additionally, rising incomes will likely increase the demand for climate intensive diets, which tend to have higher negative environmental impacts. These projections indicate that without significant transformation towards more sustainable food production practices, less waste and healthier diets, food systems will continue to exert high pressure on biodiversity loss, land and water use, air and water pollution, and climate change and their currently known boundaries. Transgressing these boundaries could constrain food systems’ resilience, the ability to provide safe and sufficient food for everyone and have adverse impacts on human and ecological systems more broadly, particularly in times of disturbances, conflicts and shocks. With the COVID-19 pandemic, there are significant new uncertainties and profound implications for achieving and maintaining this resilience and sustainability across the globe. Food systems are under pressure not only to deliver safe and high-quality food in adequate quantities in a sustainable way, but also to help address poverty by creating jobs and decent livelihoods in an equitable manner. The current COVID-19 pandemic has imposed an additional level of pressure on the governance, functionality, efficiency and resilience of food systems, with potentially long-lasting implications. While the pandemic exposed the significant vulnerabilities of food systems, it could also provide an opportunity for reimagining them, if bold policies are applied that accelerate economic, societal, and technological transformations towards a more socially just and sustainable global food system.