News & insights Blog & insights Working up an appetite for deep and urgent change in our global food systems This month, Forum for the Future is shining a light on our efforts to shape the food transition towards a just and regenerative future. Forum’s Global Food System Transition Lead Geraldine Gilbert outlines: what are we seeing, what’s going well? And what's our collective contribution with the changemakers we work with? Our global food system is in transition, given unprecedented interacting environmental and socio-economic pressures. As climate change, nature collapse and deep social inequalities threaten our fundamental ability to feed ourselves, solutions are emerging and being implemented—but are they enough to put us on a rapid path to a thriving food future for everyone, or are they reinforcing a soon-to-be-obsolete system? In effect, the current food system does not deliver well for most people beyond a lucky few. Instead, it’s given us a global pandemic of malnutrition and risky reliance on very few crops and species; horrific environmental damage and pollution; vast amounts of waste; and poor working conditions, livelihoods and prospects for millions of farmers and food workers everywhere. The damage it’s inflicting is also eroding the system’s very ability to continue and piling up risk at all levels. All the technology in the world won’t be enough to farm without predictable weather, pollinators, fertile soil, resilient infrastructure, and skilled farmers and workers willing and able to do the job. The next course for the food system Given the choice, our food system is hardly what we’d design from scratch. But the good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. At this crossroads, the overriding challenge is: how do we collectively transition to a food system that gives us all what we really need? That is: healthy, nutritious food that’s affordable and accessible to everyone; decent work and shared economic prosperity across the board; and the necessary foundations—a stable climate and thriving nature. All this, without relying on fossil fuels. It’s a huge task, beyond incremental, separate efficiency gains (a bit less carbon emitted here, a bit less sugar consumed there...), into deeper transformation of the underlying models for how we grow, move, eat, and make a profit from food, for multiple combined positive outcomes (less carbon and better diets and improved livelihoods). But there is so much potential, opportunity, passion and appetite for change to tap into. Changemakers across food and farming, from industry to civil society, policy and communities, are innovating, experimenting and investing for positive change. How do we ensure these efforts really add up, to move fast and far enough, out of the current, damaging models and into a future-fit, resilient way of doing things, and while ensuring no one gets left behind? At Forum for the Future, we actively monitor the food and agriculture transition, working with changemakers across the food system to explore and highlight the potential for positive transformation; make sense of the opportunities and barriers; identify where and how to act with most impact; and support individual and collective efforts to shape the transition for the best possible outcomes. We focus on two areas in particular: Reframing the narratives about what our food system is for and how to change it, to drive more holistic, integrated and effective efforts, from farming to diets; and Tackling systemic barriers to scaling regenerative agriculture, while championing a broad, holistic understanding of approaches and desirable outcomes. What are we observing as the wider transition plays out? What’s slowing down progress? Siloed approaches to change, within sectors, issues and solutions Many players are still treating complex, mutually reinforcing challenges as separate issues. Unsurprisingly, their solutions are inevitably falling short. Relatively few food businesses have robust targets to reduce their Scope 3 emissions, but those who do risk “carbon tunnel vision”—the sole focus on emissions obscuring or even elbowing out the need to tackle socioeconomic inequalities and poor diets, affecting farmers, workers and consumers. Many food companies, wherever in the value chain, remain blind to their strategic reliance on biodiversity or even on agriculture. At best, these siloed approaches are inefficient and costly; at worst, they risk achieving progress on some fronts (e.g. emissions reductions) while reinforcing damage elsewhere (e.g. lack of farm-level profitability). Incrementalism over transformative thinking So much effort and investment across the food industry, policymaking and even academic research is focused on incremental progress instead of transformative action. We are stringing out unviable models—tinkering with pollution, emissions, water use, product nutrition—instead of driving breakthroughs for our health, wellbeing and overall food security. While small steps can help to test ways forward, we need to get beyond efficiency gains and never-ending pilots into transforming core business models, value chains, food environments and eating behaviours. We also need to get past unhelpful complacency and techno-optimism, inherent in arguments that “it’s ok, we’ll simply innovate our way out of the challenges.” If that is the case, then what are we waiting for? Universalism and generic solutions instead of context-specificity We need to stop looking for silver-bullet, one-size-fits-all solutions: a miracle low-carbon protein production technology, a winning set of regenerative agriculture practices for all farms everywhere, a universally applicable healthy, sustainable product/diet. This is at best a distraction from the nature of the change that’s really needed, and at worst it perpetuates the flaws and lack of resilience of our current system. While it may feel laborious, food actors need to embrace context-specificity and diversity as conditions for their future viability—accepting the most effective solutions will vary for different farming landscapes, food supply chains, food cultures, and policy contexts; and that different communities can and should have a say in what our future food system(s) looks like. What’s working and gives us hope? The power and potential of collective exploration and shared visions In our experience, the most promising thinking and experimentation comes from outside of the mainstream of food industry, where even the most ambitious, skilled and passionate changemakers are finding themselves constrained by the status quo of dominant business and economic models. That said, through Forum’s Growing our Future programmes on scaling regenerative agriculture, we have found plenty of potential for common ground and mutual support across different “parts of the system”—for example, across civil society, social entrepreneurs, champion regenerative farmers, as well as mainstream food businesses. Convening different players with very different interests and perspectives to understand the whole picture of collective action, where they each fit, and the potential gaps and synergies between efforts and stakeholders, has helped them to refine their respective roles in the transition, while highlighting opportunities for more alignment and collaboration. Bountiful knowledge and tools to support transformation At Forum for the Future, we often open our multi-stakeholder workshops with the framing that each of us only knows a little, but together we know a lot. Across the food system, we have plenty of knowledge, insight and innovation to build on: from robust academic food systems frameworks and hard scientific facts to well-tested practical solutions. There is huge potential for better progress in those with more power and resources getting behind existing solutions, acting on what we already know, and avoiding duplicating effort (and mistakes). That might be through ever more pre-competitive collaboration and open-source approaches to innovation, or by being brave and honest about what needs to happen. It might well be time for the food industry to admit how much it shapes eating behaviours for example, and to fully engage with the climate and health imperatives of phasing out the most intensive livestock production and reducing meat over-consumption. Shifting mindsets and turning business cases on their head Many changemakers in even the more progressive mainstream food businesses still face increasing pressure to justify budgets for the work meant to keep them commercially viable in our fast-changing world, from regenerative agriculture programmes to health and nutrition efforts. We see lightbulbs come on in the minds of decision-makers and budget-holders when assumptions are turned inside out and upside down. The cost of progressive action looks far less prohibitive in light of a robust assessment of the cost of inaction, and there is effectively no business case for climate breakdown or nature collapse. No agriculture = no food business! Telling a compelling story with the hard facts of what the future holds and some provocative “what ifs” can help to shift decision-makers' understanding of strategic risks and opportunities, and willingness to back ambitious action. Time to reshape the global food system The science could not be clearer about where our global food system is heading, as well as how it’s failing us today. A transition is playing out regardless. Do we collectively, proactively and urgently up our game to transform our dominant food models (for industry, value chains, diets, policy...) for all-round better outcomes? Or do we wait to be forced to transform, at far greater expense to industry, governments and humanity, when “business as usual” (inevitably, and very soon) runs out of road? As the proverb goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. For reshaping the global food system, that time has come and gone; the second best time is now. We have plenty of tools to work with, and there’s never any shortage of passion or resourcefulness in the food system. Time to unleash it at scale. Learn more about how we're shaping a deep and urgent transformation in food systems Interested in exploring a partnership for your food work? Write to us Manage Cookie Preferences