A transformation of global food systems is not only “biophysically and technically feasible” but could deliver net benefits of US$5 trillion a year until 2050, according to the independent Food System Economics Commission (FSEC).
The Food System Economics Commission (FSEC) is a joint initiative that brings together 21 commissioners from 19 global institutions. It aims to provide political and economic decision-makers with evidence-based tools to transform food and land-use systems.
Caterina Ruggeri Laderchi, director of the FSEC, believes that governments and stakeholders are ready to focus on policy changes that will enable positive changes to global food systems.
“We are at a special point in time when there is growing commitment to a sustainability transformation for food systems across a variety of stakeholders. The process of the UN Food System Summit has certainly galvanised country-level commitments to design food system transition pathways. These transition pathways represent a new focus on food systems as a policy space, and new sensitivity to the need for new forms of governance that allow for joined up - and consistent - policy making,” she told this publication.
She made these comments in the context of the FSEC’s new Global Policy Report, which summarises the findings of a four-year investigation by the independent academic commission. Authored by Ruggeri Laderchi, the report builds on the insights of other contributions whilst delivering assessment of how the benefits of transforming food systems surpass the costs by an order of magnitude – the overall net benefits are estimated at USD 5 trillion a year until 2050.
It outlines what a transformation from today’s food systems to an “inclusive, health-enhancing and environmentally sustainable global food system” entails, and shows that such a transformation is not only feasible, but also offers “immense economic benefits” to societies across the world.
The net benefits of achieving a food system transformation are worth five to 10 trillion USD a year, equivalent to between four and eight percent of global GDP in 2020, according the FSEC.
The report identifies five “operational goals” to be pursued when designing strategies to transform food systems towards more health supporting inclusive and environmentally sustainable outcomes.
Those are: shifting consumption towards healthy diets; strengthening livelihoods throughout food systems; protecting intact land and restoring degraded land; shifting towards environmentally sustainable production throughout food systems and strengthening food system resilience.
It also details five “entry points” to ignite this transformation agenda: shifting consumption patterns towards healthy diets, repurposing government support for agriculture, targeting revenue from new taxes to support the transformation; ensuring no-one is left behind; and investing in new technologies.
Ruggeri Laderchi acknowledged that this might look like a daunting agenda, but pointed out that there are many synergies across these different objectives.
“For example, ensuring universal consumption of healthy diets would by itself provide at least three quarters of the gains of transforming the whole of food systems. This is because changes in demand would trigger all kinds of changes in supply, land and other resource use, to help significantly shift the whole system.”
She added that there are also trade-offs, particularly in terms of the inclusion agenda, with labour re-allocation being one example.
“Transforming food systems could help accelerate the long-term processes of structural transformation by which, typically, labour is released from agriculture to join other sectors of the economy - especially in lower income countries where a higher proportion of the population depends on food production,” Ruggeri Laderchi said.
She continued: “Also, while transforming food systems, prices could change significantly, affecting both farmer livelihoods and the prices that consumers face. Ensuring that there are mechanisms for ensuring that the transition can be fair and that distributional tensions can be minimised is therefore critical for the transformation.”
She said there is a lot that the FSEC’s body of work can offer to these country processes in terms of analytical tools and policy insights.
The FSEC has broken new ground in terms of framing the issues around food system transformation, developing new analytical tools and offering broad insights.
“In this sense it is contributing to raising global awareness of the role that food systems play at the nexus of some of the biggest threats facing humanity, from climate change to the obesity, to food insecurity and rising hunger,” said Ruggeri Laderchi.
“We are also very pleased that so many of the tools and research developed for the Commission are now feeding into other efforts,” she said, citing the 2023 and 2024 Flagship SOFA (State of Food and Agriculture) reports by FAO as an example of this. These reports build on the methodology developed by the FSEC for assessing the hidden costs of food systems. Another example is the EAT Lancet 2.0 report which builds on some of the advances introduced for the FSEC modelling.
The FSEC is an independent academic commission that was set up in 2020 to equip political and economic decision-makers with tools and evidence to shift food and land-use systems. It was convened by the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research (PIK), the Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU) and EAT to provide a rigorous assessment of the costs of action and inaction in transforming food systems.
