Key challenges for achieving sustainable future food systems
- Inclusiveness, ensuring economic and social inclusion for all food system actors, including smallholder farmers, women and youth;
- Sustainability, minimising negative environmental impacts, conserving scarce natural resources and strengthening resiliency against future shocks;
- Efficiency, producing adequate quantities of food for global needs while minimising losses and waste;
- Nutritious and healthy, providing and promoting consumption of diverse nutritious and safe foods for a healthy diet.
There are several critical issues that challenge food system performance: (a) rapid urbanisation and the growth of megacities, (b) requirements for agro-food systems upgrading, and (c) management of food access, distribution and price through rural-urban linkages.
Urbanisation. More people live today in urban than in rural areas and by 2050 two-thirds of the world population will reside in cities. Economic growth is rarely keeping pace with the cities’ growth. This leads to difficulties for people finding employment, pressure on land and housing allocation, and growing demands for urban planning and governance. Developing inclusive and sustainable food systems for the rapidly expanding urban populations is one of the most pressing challenges.
Value chain upgrading. The provision of healthy food to these urban agglomerations puts enormous pressure on the agro-food subsystem. If this increased and changing demand is to be met by domestic supply, local agricultural production needs to become more diversified. More value can be added to agricultural products through processing, trade and packaging. Currently, in many food systems these processes tend to be energy-intensive and are accompanied by substantial losses due to inadequate handling and/or infrastructure failures. On the other hand, they may also provide new employment opportunities outside agriculture.
Food price management and rural-urban linkages. Rural-urban interfaces also deserve attention for improving the stability of food supply and access to food, both in terms of seasonal variation as well as with respect to food prices. Consumers can be heavily affected by sudden food price spikes due to harvest failures or increasing demand. This might not only be a fairly expensive strategy but could also lead to market imbalances if sales are not in line with regular price tendencies. Whereas food price management for key staple crops (rice, maize) is sometimes understood from a food sovereignty perspective, prices of fresh foods like fruit, vegetables, milk, eggs and meat tend to be more volatile.
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