The State of Food Systems Worldwide: Counting Down to 2030
Abstract
Transforming food systems is essential to bring about a healthier, equitable, sustainable, and resilient future, including achieving global development and sustainability goals. To date, no comprehensive framework exists to track food systems transformation and their contributions to global goals. In 2021, the Food Systems Countdown to 2030 Initiative (FSCI) articulated an architecture to monitor food systems across five themes: 1 diets, nutrition, and health; 2 environment, natural resources, and production; 3 livelihoods, poverty, and equity; 4 governance; and 5 resilience and sustainability. Each theme comprises three-to-five indicator domains. This paper builds on that architecture, presenting the inclusive, consultative process used to select indicators and an application of the indicator framework using the latest available data, constructing the first global food systems baseline to track transformation. While data are available to cover most themes and domains, critical indicator gaps exist such as off-farm livelihoods, food loss and waste, and governance. Baseline results demonstrate every region or country can claim positive outcomes in some parts of food systems, but none are optimal across all domains, and some indicators are independent of national income. These results underscore the need for dedicated monitoring and transformation agendas specific to food systems. Tracking these indicators to 2030 and beyond will allow for data-driven food systems governance at all scales and increase accountability for urgently needed progress toward achieving global goals.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2303.13669,
title = {The State of Food Systems Worldwide: Counting Down to 2030},
author = {Kate Schneider and Jessica Fanzo and Lawrence Haddad and Mario Herrero and Jose Rosero Moncayo and Anna Herforth and Roseline Reman and Alejandro Guarin and Danielle Resnick and Namukolo Covic and Christophe Béné and Andrea Cattaneo and Nancy Aburto and Ramya Ambikapathi and Destan Aytekin and Simon Barquera and Jane Battersby-Lennard and Ty Beal and Paulina Bizzoto Molina and Carlo Cafiero and Christine Campeau and Patrick Caron and Piero Conforti and Kerstin Damerau and Michael DiGirolamo and Fabrice DeClerck and Deviana Dewi and Ismahane Elouafi and Carola Fabi and Pat Foley and Ty Frazier and Jessica Gephart and Christopher Golden and Carlos Gonzalez Fischer and Sheryl Hendriks and Maddalena Honorati and Jikun Huang and Gina Kennedy and Amos Laar and Rattan Lal and Preetmoninder Lidder and Brent Loken and Quinn Marshall and Yuta Masuda and Rebecca McLaren and Lais Miachon and Hernán Muñoz and Stella Nordhagen and Naina Qayyum and Michaela Saisana and Diana Suhardiman and Rashid Sumaila and Maximo Torrero Cullen and Francesco Tubiello and Jose-Luis Vivero-Pol and Patrick Webb and Keith Wiebe},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.13669},
year = {2023}
}