The Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition published its new Report, Future Food Systems: For people, our planet and prosperity on the 29th September 2020

This evidence-based report offers policy solutions to improve the quality of diets using a food systems approach through promoting availability, accessibility, affordability, desirability, and sustainable, healthy diets for all.

See Panel members with partners and other stakeholders talking about the report here, including Prof. Patrick Webb's summary of the report at the CFS High-Level Special Event on 15 October. 

The need for action on malnutrition

Today, there are 690 million chronically undernourished people around the world. Nearly 3 billion people are unable to afford a healthy diet and poor-quality diets are linked to 11 million deaths per year.

In order to deliver sustainable, healthy diets for all, food systems must be fundamentally transformed. They remain profoundly dysfunctional. Most countries are not on track to meet most of the nutrition targets for 2025 by the World Health Assembly. So much more has to be done, including shifting dietary patterns globally to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and impacts on biodiversity.

The Report

The aim and key added value of this report is to draw on the best available science and evidence to set out a practical way forward which is grounded in the realities of policy development in LMICs.

The advice and recommendations offered by the Global Panel are aimed primarily at decision makers in LMICs, but they alone cannot turn global challenges around. In a highly interconnected world, high-income countries also have a vital role to play, particularly where their own decisions have impacts on LMICs. High-income countries (HICs) not only share responsibility for some of the major problems facing us all but are also facing obesity and diet-related disease epidemics of their own.

This report shows that the underlying problems run deep. Our food systems are failing to produce the foods essential for healthy diets in sufficient quantity and at affordable prices. They are also driving degradation of the natural environment – soil, water and air quality, biodiversity loss and climate change – and dangerously undermining our future well-being. Since this report was commissioned in 2018, COVID-19 has highlighted just how fragile and precarious the world’s food systems have become. The situation is unsustainable.