Sustainable Food Systems: The Way Forward in the Indian Context

ABSTRACT

Current Indian food system is not sustainable as it fails to fulfil its primary function of delivering adequate nutrition to its population while causing high environmental impacts along with widespread poverty among farmers. Here, we discuss how recent research has enabled quantification of a country’s current food system sustainability through multiple indicators across nutrition, environmental, and economic dimensions. This data can be used by policy makers, farmers, businesses, consumers, and other stakeholders to make scientific evidence-based informed decisions regarding which diets and food items to promote or discourage in near future to make progress towards sustainability. While several government initiatives are underway to transform Indian agri-food sector, the need of the hour is multi-sectoral collaboration across ministries along with dietary behavior changes by consumers, and innovations in agritech and food formulations by businesses to make farm production more efficient and products more nutrient dense.