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Roberto Ridolfi, FAO Assistant Director-General, emphasizes that the future of food must align with sustainable food systems, closely linked to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 2 (ending hunger) and SDG 12 (ensuring sustainable consumption and production). Transforming global food systems requires focusing on three key areas: economic prosperity, social well-being, and environmental protection. Achieving food sustainability involves learning from traditional and cultural practices, educating and empowering consumers, and leveraging digital technologies to accelerate innovative agricultural solutions, making them accessible as global public goods.
Addressing social sustainability means confronting critical food system weaknesses exposed by the pandemic, which disproportionately affected vulnerable populations. Environmental sustainability demands rethinking food systems to safeguard biodiversity and mitigate climate change. FAO’s 2019 report highlights biodiversity’s vital role in food security, nutrition, and production resilience. It also identifies key drivers for reversing biodiversity loss trends, including supportive public policies and scientific and technological advancements. These combined efforts are essential for creating sustainable, resilient, and equitable food systems worldwide.
The new food system must be sustainable, both economically and socially. And of course, environmentally.
Roberto Ridolfi, FAO Assistant Director-General, tells us that the future of food has to be associated with sustainable food systems and, specifically, with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially with SDG No. 2, which seeks to eradicate hunger, and with SDG No. 12, which seeks to ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.
The transformation of the world’s food systems must pivot on the following axes:
- Economic impact -Prosperity.
- Social impact – People.
- Environmental impact – Planet.
How to move towards food sustainability?
- Taking as an example the healthiest and most sustainable traditional and cultural customs.
- Educating and empowering consumers.
- Harnessing the power of digital technologies to accelerate and scale innovative ideas with high potential impact on food and agriculture, transforming digital solutions and services into global public goods.
Moving towards greater social sustainability implies attacking and correcting the most critical deficiencies in food systems, which have surfaced with the pandemic, threatening the lives and livelihoods of people around the world, especially the most vulnerable groups.
To move towards greater environmental sustainability, we must rethink food systems to protect biodiversity and do what we can to slow climate change.
The cost of biodiversity
FAO, in its 2019 report, “The State of the World’s Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture“, provides an assessment of biodiversity for food and agriculture worldwide. This assessment describes the many contributions that biodiversity makes to food security and nutrition, and to the resilience of production systems, and points to the main drivers towards a change in trend:
- Public policies for the protection of biodiversity.
- Advances in Science and Technology.
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