Transforming our food systems

I am very pleased to announce the recent release of two transformative reports prepared by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food). They are titled “Unravelling the Food-Health Nexus: Addressing Practices, Political Economy, and Power Relations to Build Healthier Food Systems” and “Too Big To Feed: Exploring the Impacts of Mega-mergers, Consolidation, and Concentration of Power in the Agri-Food Sector.”

Both reports provide evidence-based information on how two key aspects of modern industrial food systems cause multiple issues and problems that have placed our food systems at risk, as well as pointing out elements of the transformative change that must occur in order to put us on the pathway toward sustainability. Using the understanding that agroecology is the ecology of the entire food system as a foundation, these two reports continue the work of IPES-Food as a leader in the global movement for food system change.

The Unraveling the Food-Health Nexus report was commissioned by the Global Alliance for the Future of Food and written by IPES-Food. It provides a comprehensive overview of the health impacts of food systems, identifying the channels through which food systems affect human health, and how prevailing power relations and imperatives in food systems help to shape our understanding of the impacts they generate. The report asks why evidence gaps persist, why negative impacts are systematically reproduced, and why certain problems are not politically prioritized. The report shows how unhealthy work conditions, contamination of water, soil and air, contaminated foods, unhealthy diets, and food insecurity interact in interrelated, self-reinforcing, and complex ways. Most importantly, it highlights five leverage points that can be used to build healthier food systems, and action that can be taken collectively to accelerate a shift from a food system that often results in harm to a system based on health promotion and protection.

The Too Big To Feed report delves deeply into how the dominant agri-food firms have become too big to feed humanity sustainably, too big to operate on equitable terms with other food system actors, and too big to drive the types of innovation needed to create transformative change. The report identifies Big Data as a powerful new driver of consolidation, allowing companies to bring satellite data services, input provision, farm-level genomic information, farm machinery, and market information under one roof. The report draws on the most recent data to identify unprecedented levels of market concentration throughout the agri-food sector. It points out recent steps that have been taken to redefine anticompetitive practices and how to build a new antitrust environment, but also points out that these steps must be accompanied by measures to fundamentally realign incentives in food systems and address the root causes of consolidation, including more transnational oversight of consolidation and megamergers. In order to harness the benefits of the data revolution for all, a shift toward diversified and decentralized innovation, locally applicable knowledge and open access technologies – a new ‘wide tech’ paradigm’ – is also required. Short supply chains, innovative distribution and exchange models, and “solidarity economy” initiatives are circumventing, disrupting, and de-consolidating mainstream supply chains – and must be urgently supported, the report says.

The strength of both reports lies in the ways they provide realistic opportunities and recommendations for change. They build off of the first major IPES-Food report “From Uniformity to Diversity” (Gliessman 2016) where the “lock-ins” that keep our food system on a pathway leading away from diversified agroecological systems are discussed in considerable detail. These two new reports delve more deeply into broader and more complex components of food systems that too often are thought to be outside the venue of agroecology. Through the holistic food system lens of agroecology, where the potential levers for change are identified, the transdisciplinary work of IPES-Food is making important contributions to the development of the foundations for food system transformation.

For access to the full reports, as well as future activities of IPES-Food, visit their website at www.ipes-food.org.