Do not transform food systems on the backs of the rural poor.

Even prior to COVID, there was a considerable push for food system transformation to achieve better nutrition and health as well as environmental and climate change outcomes. Recent years have seen a large number of high visibility and influential publications on food system transformation. Literature is emerging questioning the utility and scope of these analyses, particularly in terms of trade-offs among multiple objectives. We build on these critiques of emerging food system transformation approaches in our review of four recent and influential publications from the EAT-Lancet Commission, the IPCC, the World Resources Institute and the Food and Land Use Coalition. We argue that a major problem is the lack of explicit inclusion of the livelihoods of poor rural people in their modeling approaches and insufficient measures to ensure that the nature and scale of the envisioned changes will improve these livelihoods. Unless livelihoods and socioeconomic inclusion more broadly are brought to the center of such approaches, we very much risk transforming food systems to reach environmental and nutritional objectives on the backs of the rural poor.

Financing adaptation for resilient livelihoods under food system transformation: the role of Multilateral Development Banks.

Climate change is imposing a transformative process on agricultural and food systems, threatening the livelihoods of people dependent upon them which includes a large share of the world's poor people. Transformative adaptation that addresses the risks and vulnerabilities to livelihoods that climate change imposes is essential for effective and inclusive transformation of food systems. Financing that is adequate, accessible and appropriate is essential to realizing these objectives. Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) are already playing an important role in financing transformative adaptation in the agri-food sector and are well-placed to address some of the existing shortcomings. Expanding public sector climate finance and incentivizing private sector investments is needed to attain adequate levels of financing. Reconsidering the rules and procedures for obtaining public sector finance and the capacity to utilize already existent administrative structures, as well as better targeting of activities and communities is important for accessibility. Appropriate finance requires use of mechanisms that address characteristics of the investment, including riskiness, delayed returns, high social values and new and unproven activities. Utilizing blended finance integrated with development finance can generate financing appropriate to the investment needs. Some positive shifts in these directions are already being undertaken by MDBs but more is required.

Towards food systems transformation-five paradigm shifts for healthy, inclusive and sustainable food systems.

Food systems must serve different societal, public health and individual nutrition, and environmental objectives and therefore face numerous challenges. Considering the integrated performances of food systems, this paper highlights five fundamental paradigm shifts that are required to overcome trade-offs and build synergies between health and nutrition, inclusive livelihoods, environmental sustainability and food system resilience. We focus on the challenges to raise policy ambitions, to harmonize production and consumption goals, to improve connectivity between them, to strengthen food system performance and to anchor the governance of food systems in inclusive policies and participatory institutions. Taken together, these shifts in paradigms shape a new discourse for food system transformation that will be capable to respond to current and future policy challenges.

Shedding light on the evidence blind spots confounding the multiple objectives of SDG 2.

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 consists of five targets ranging from the eradication of hunger and malnutrition to doubling productivity of small-scale farmers and ensuring sustainable and resilient food production systems. Trade-offs and synergies arise between strategies to achieve any one of these targets, which complicates the use of evidence to guide policies and investments since most analyses focus solely on one objective. This gives rise to 'blind spots' in the evidence base, where acting to achieve one objective can have strong impacts on achieving others, hampering attempts to establish a systematic approach to attaining the multiple objectives of SDG 2. Here, we focus on three key blind spots that arise from potential interactions between increasing agricultural productivity and enhancing the sustainability of food production systems, eradicating hunger and malnutrition, and increasing the resilience of food production systems to climate change. Incorporating the consideration of synergies and trade-offs into policy-making is also essential; however, there is relatively little evidence of this occurring in national policies to date.