The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has cited that the current global agrifood system is sick.
According to FAO, the agrifood system is everything that is connected to food and agriculture, what we eat from our mouths all the way back to the way that food is sold, distributed and processed, and how food is grown in the fields, on the land, in the seas, and other products grown, which may not be food, but fuel, fibre.
“We need to transform the agrifood system because now its power to provide those solutions is not there, the agrifood system is sick, it is not well. The way it is designed, the way it functions means that it is weak, it lacks resilience, it is not strong enough, and is worn out,” ,” said Corinna Hawkes, FAO’s Director of Food Systems and Food Safety Division.
“How can anything that is exhausted provide solutions? So, the frustration and the challenge here, is that the potential power of the agrifood system to provide these solutions is not there until we transform it to make it stronger helping it provide the solutions we know it can provide.
“Some of the major challenges include the way food is grown and produced is contributing to climate change, which in turn weakens the agrifood system, but this does not need to be the case, the agrifood system is also a source of solutions to climate change.”
“The agrifood system is also producing the kind of food that makes people sick and when people are sick, they can’t function well in the agrifood system, they are part of it. So that makes it weaker.”
“What we have done over the last decades is to specialize in producing certain key commodity crops, and it was a great idea from the perspective of productivity and efficiency, it cheapens food, it means you can trade the food, and it reduces the cost of production.
“It is important we produce these crops efficiently, but what we have seen is that reducing diversity too much reduces the resilience of the system, and we have seen with recent conflicts how reliance on certain key producers reduces that resilience.
So, we need to think much more carefully about how we produce diversity, which is also good for biodiversity, it is also good for the environment, and it is also good for people because we need to have a diversity of food on our plates.”
