Food Justice and Food Systems Transformation
Food systems are central to ecosystem health, social justice and well-being, food and nutrition security, culture and landscape protection, and planetary rights. The current model of industrialized agriculture is posing critical challenges regarding biodiversity loss, overconsumption of water, greenhouse gas emissions, groundwater pollution, and antibiotic resistance phenomena, with very serious implications for human, animal and environmental health. Food systems today are impacted by pandemics associated with reduced natural spaces and biodiversity. Climate change and water crises severely affect agriculture and food production. Food systems are in the grip of financial speculation and corporate concentration and are exposed to the serious weaknesses of global supply chains. Food inequality and poverty, aggravated by armed conflicts and related insecurity conditions, continue to grow or to remain at unacceptably high levels. The crisis is not one of global availability, but of unequal and inequitable access to food. The causes are structural and addressing them requires a deep transformation of our food systems.
Resilient40 Priorities on food: The priorities identified by R40 include food security, infrastructure, gender, and accountability. The deliverables are related to food and finance, food and climate, and other cross-cutting initiatives related to research and innovation for development and gender. In the area of food and finance, food swap initiatives are gaining attention as a means of addressing food security, while African governments are calling for Special Drawing Rights to promote food security. R40 supports transparency and predictability for export bans in agriculture. Infrastructures are considered as central to linking agriculture and energy to address the climate crisis. The Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII), a multi-year financing plan for infrastructure, builds on the COP 28 declaration which calls for the integration of climate and agricultural plans.
The Global North food strategies remain uncertain at this stage, with many unknown elements such as the focus of investment, the different actors’ roles, the impact of de-risking amid geopolitical tensions, the scope and coherence of the European Union flagship proposals for cooperation in Africa, and the outcome of these Food Security Initiatives. R40 aims to address the food-climate nexus and reinforce African youth commitments to sustainable food systems.
Challenges
Food Governance
Decision-making related to food is dispersed across several forums, where the voices of the most affected are often disregarded by powerful states. Additionally, global corporations have consolidated their power in global supply chains to unprecedented levels. This trend is mainly due to inadequate regulation by governments, treating food as a profit-generating commodity rather than a fundamental human right, as in the TRIPs agreement. Unregulated digitalization of agriculture is currently driving the concentration of corporate power in the food supply chain.
The increasing weight of financial actors in the economy has led to speculation on food and land and has sparked hikes and instability of food prices. To address this issue and alleviate debt burdens requires rethinking financial governance. Global trade rules and WTO policies need reform since they disregard workers’ conditions, human rights, and democracy and exacerbate food crises by discouraging public strategic food reserves. The use of food as a weapon of war, a particularly worrying governance challenge today, must be banned in line with International Humanitarian Law and the UN Security Council Resolution 2417 (2018).
Agroecology Transition and Just Food Systems
Certain policies, such as those of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), undermine farmers’ rights to their own seeds, in contradiction with other relevant policies such as UNDROP (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas) and the International Treaty on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.
Access to land is obstructed by land grabbing, unfavorable laws, and land tenure systems, particularly for women, youth, and vulnerable groups. Smallholder farmers lack the necessary resources to engage in sustainable agriculture. These resources include knowledge, inputs, services, and market access. This problem is compounded by the failure of many states to meet their commitment to invest at least 10% of their budgets in agriculture, as outlined in the Malabo Declaration of 2014. Moreover, underinvestment in agriculture has made the sector extremely vulnerable to shocks such as the pandemics, climate change, and tensions in world markets.
The industrial farming and livestock system, under the control of corporations, relies on subsidies that hinder the transition to sustainable agriculture. Consumers face challenges in accessing information, while farmers engaged in this system suffer from inadequate incomes and are trapped in a vicious cycle of policies that perpetuate polluting agriculture.
Food Crisis
Hunger and food crises are complex issues that affect many areas and people around the world. The Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC) for 2023 highlights that an increasing number of people are experiencing acute food insecurity and require immediate assistance. The underlying causes of these crises are structural. They are linked to regional conflicts, climate change, poverty, and inequality, which are further compounded by dysfunctional food systems and a lack of adequate social protection and access to basic services.
A major challenge in addressing food crises is the lack of funding, especially in an era of structural instability and “poly-crisis”. According to the Hunger Funding Gap Report of 2024, only 35% of appeals for countries facing crisis levels of hunger were met in 2023. This resulted in a hunger funding gap of 65%, which increased by 23% from the previous year. The problem is not a lack of food or resources but of political will to collect and use them in a coordinated and effective ways.
Despite increased food production, little has changed in food reserve utilization rates. Malnutrition, hunger, and obesity-related diseases are symptoms of systemic issues. To address this, global and local food systems need to be rethought.
R40 Policy Asks
Support democratic policy decision-making rooted in a human rights framework
The UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) must be recognized and supported as the leading international, multi-actor, and intergovernmental policy platform on food security and nutrition. Together with its High-Level Panel of Experts and the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples Mechanism, and along with global south youth, can ensure quality analysis, independence, and democratic participation in decision-making processes on food systems. It can help provide globally coordinated, transformative policy responses to emerging food crises. We must continue to involve all actors in dialogue and negotiation regarding food systems and related issues at all levels.
It is important to uphold existing international frameworks that have been agreed upon by all parties, such as the UN Decade for Family Farming (UNDFF), the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition, and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). ‘Multistakeholder’ approaches to governance should be excluded since they overlook human rights, and power imbalances, hinder marginalized social groups’ participation, and remove government accountability. Third parties should ensure that private interests do not override the interests of the populations most affected by nutritional insecurity and that safeguards are in place to limit conflicts of interest between the international private sector and the interests of populations in contexts.
Reformulate trade agreements, market regulations, and investments
The commitment made by the African Agricultural Ministers to monitor agricultural markets and promote transparency in them should be reaffirmed and implemented. It is important to support the introduction of market regulations that ensure fair prices for small-scale food producers, which should cover their production costs and provide just remuneration for their labor. Additionally, it is crucial to ensure healthy diets at accessible prices for food-insecure consumers. To promote local food production and food security, low-income, food-import-dependent countries should be allowed to block imports that undercut local products. Moreover, they should be granted policy space to adopt measures such as food stocks and public procurement.
Public policies should prioritize investment frameworks over public-private partnerships in agriculture to protect family farmers who are the biggest investors in agriculture. The World Bank should update its Corporate Scorecard to include sustainability indicators on agriculture, family farming, territorial markets, food security, and nutrition progress. Investments promoting industrialized agriculture and export-oriented supply chains that impede people’s access to land, water, and seeds should be banned.
Ensure Policy Coherence for Development
The Global North should ensure that their policies and practices do not harm the food security of any partner countries. This applies specifically to areas such as debt, climate, trade, agriculture, fishery policies, and corporate due diligence.
Moreover, the Global North should take the lead in cancelling debts, especially for Africa. This will create the necessary fiscal space for African governments to establish proper social protection schemes and mechanisms and to promote domestic food provisioning and access to public services such as water, health and sanitation, education. It is also important to ensure corporate due diligence, support the Binding Treaty on Business and Human Rights, and adopt participatory systems to verify that all investments, whether public or private, comply with environmental and human rights standards.
Sustain the agroecology transition and food system transformation
It is important to support international actors who are committed to building resilient food systems alongside local communities, farmers, indigenous peoples, and other marginalized communities. This can be achieved by co-planning agroecological and food system transformation pathways with a view to subsidiarity. Policies should be strengthened to support the agroecological transition and the role of farmers in managing the rural environment and biodiversity. The agricultural subsidy system should be repurposed with a balanced approach that enables farmers to manage the transition phase to sustainable agriculture. We need to transform food systems to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other climate impacts, support climate adaptation efforts, protect biodiversity, and accelerate the adoption of the Global Biodiversity Framework.
To achieve a more sustainable and equitable food system, we must prioritize transforming livestock production and aquaculture to reduce industrialization and antimicrobial use. This will increase access to diverse, nutrient-rich diets and build food sovereignty and resilience for smallholder farmers. Protecting land rights and promoting inclusive innovation processes are also crucial.
Support to resilient territorial food systems
The local territorial dimension of the food system should be strengthened and the participation of all key stakeholders encouraged through dialogues, policies, and investments. This will increase the resilience to shocks and fragilities of the global supply chains. We also support the finalization of the Sustainable Food Systems Framework (FSFS), which is a flagship initiative of the EU’s Farm to Fork strategy. This initiative aims to integrate sustainability into all food policies, and strengthen the resilience of the food system.
Support for gender justice
It is essential to have public policies in place that make it easier for women to access resources and services, while also guaranteeing their land rights. Additionally, we need to increase investments and programs for agroecological transition in food systems that recognize and enhance the role of women in all aspects of the supply chain. It is important to adequately consider and support the role of women and indigenous knowledge in food systems, biodiversity conservation, as well as climate change adaptation and mitigation. We should support the empowerment and agency of women within food systems by transforming social norms and structural barriers to ensure full inclusion, including access to financial services and enforcement of land rights. We should support economic empowerment by recognising women’s workload and their overrepresentation in the unpaid care economy as a main factor for malnutrition by supporting a universal basic income for the first thousand days of a child’s life to reduce the gender nutrition gap. We should also actively support the collection and use of data disaggregated by gender and age to significantly improve action and accountability for nutrition and food systems for women and girls.
Prevent the Food Crisis
Data collection and analysis on food insecurity should be scaled up to strengthen the evidence basis for anticipatory action. This should be done recognizing the centrality of the Integrated Phase Classification (IPC), in line with the 2021 Pact on Famine Prevention and Humanitarian Crises. It is also crucial to combine humanitarian diplomacy with funding for hunger-related programs. This will help to maintain and increase assistance where it is still needed, particularly in protracted and often overlooked crises where needs remain high.
To tackle armed conflicts, investing in peace-building and preventing the use of hunger as a weapon of war is crucial. Additionally, a more effective and reformed food aid system can help anticipate and prepare for disasters, provide access to land for displaced people and marginalized communities in fragile contexts, and invest in cost-effective approaches. Ensure greater investment in data-driven anticipatory action that effectively addresses malnutrition, including long term and flexible anticipatory financing accessible to local actors including communities, youth, civil societies and grassroots organizations as a priority, while ensuring greater investment in early warning systems as part of a global and national response to climate change.
Allocate and operationalize adequate resources to food crises
We need to establish and implement plans for addressing food security crises at both national and local levels. These plans should be coordinated and ensure a comprehensive response to deteriorating food and nutrition security situations. We should also advocate for a global plan that enhances accountability and coordination in responding to food crises, recognizing the centrality of the UN CFS. Furthermore, we must prioritize food security, nutrition, and sustainable agriculture as central themes.
To tackle hunger and build resilience, we should focus on strengthening the nexus approach, investing in prevention and preparedness. Resources should be allocated for children under five by scaling up cash assistance and essential life-saving services. Immediate food security and effective interventions should be prioritized.
Investing in nutritious school meals can also have a positive impact. It can improve attendance and concentration among students and prevent early marriage and pregnancy among adolescents.
At the 2025 Nutrition for Growth, the Global North must make ambitious and trackable commitments within a strong, transparent and accessible accountability framework. They should commit towards a multi-sectoral approach that transforms systems and reduces malnutrition. This would include strengthening health systems by boosting public funding and integrating essential nutrition intervention, mental health, and sexual/reproductive care into primary services, promoting an agroecological transition of food systems that prioritises dignified livelihoods for food producers, and priotising support for expansion of social protection floors with the goal of universal coverage.
