1887

Making Better Policies for Food Systems

image of Making Better Policies for Food Systems

Food systems around the world face a triple challenge: providing food security and nutrition for a growing global population; supporting livelihoods for those working along the food supply chain; and contributing to environmental sustainability. Better policies hold tremendous promise for making progress in these domains. This report focuses on three questions. What has been the performance of food systems to date, and what role did policies play? How can policy makers design coherent policies across the triple challenge? And how can policy makers deal with frictions related to facts, interests, and values, which often complicate the task of achieving better policies? Better policies will require breaking down silos between agriculture, health, and environmental policies, and overcoming knowledge gaps, resistance from interest groups, and differing values. Robust, inclusive, evidence-based processes are thus essential to making better policies for food systems.

English

The triple challenge

This chapter describes the main expectations of food systems in terms of the “triple challenge” of providing food security and nutrition for a growing population; providing livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people involved in farming and along the food chain, and contributing to environmental sustainability. The achievements of food systems are not as black and white as is sometimes assumed, as there has been remarkable progress in some areas. At the same time, major shortcomings exist on all three dimensions. Much is already known about how better policies could contribute to improving outcomes. Agricultural policies around the world tend to use highly distorting measures, often creating incentives for overproduction and overuse of inputs. Such policies are inefficient ways to improve livelihoods or food security, and often have negative environmental effects. Reforming these policies would go a long way to meeting the triple challenge.

English

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a Success
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error