Highlights:

The text emphasizes the urgent need for a transformation of food systems, highlighting the economic, environmental, and social benefits of such a transformation. It outlines the negative impacts of current food systems on health, the environment, and climate change, identifying unaccounted costs estimated at 15 trillion USD a year. The report also discusses the unsustainable trajectory of the global food system and the potential economic benefits of a transformation, estimating them to be worth 5 to 10 trillion USD a year.

Proposed Solutions for Food System Transformation:

1. Shifting consumption patterns towards healthy diets: The report suggests regulating the marketing of unhealthy foods to children, providing front-of-pack nutritional guidance, targeting public food procurement on healthy options, taxing sugar-sweetened beverages and unhealthy foods, and reformulating packaged food to encourage healthier dietary choices.

2. Resetting incentives by repurposing government support for agriculture: It is recommended to repurpose subsidies to improve access to healthy diets and make them more affordable. This involves reforming agricultural support to incentivize choices in line with the goals of the food system transformation, with a focus on lowering the hidden costs of food systems.

3. Targeting revenue from new taxes to support food system transformation: The report recommends taxing carbon and nitrogen pollution to help achieve positive outcomes and align with expert recommendations from bodies such as the IPCC and OECD. Designing new taxes to suit the local context and targeting resulting revenues towards direct and progressive benefits for poorer households is essential to ensure inclusive outcomes and garner political support for a food system transformation.

4. Innovating to increase labor productivity and workers’ livelihood opportunities: Public institutions can accelerate the development and diffusion of innovations that meet the needs of poorer producers and remove barriers to their adoption. Priority areas for public research and innovation include improving plant breeding, supporting environmentally sustainable, biodiversity-friendly, and low-emission farming systems, and developing digital technologies useful to small farmers.

5. Scaling-up safety nets to keep food affordable for the poorest: Developing and strengthening safety nets is crucial to making food system transformations inclusive and politically feasible. Countries should prioritize targeting limited transfer resources on children's nutritional needs and mobilizing more resources to put in place comprehensive safety nets.

Additionally, the report addresses various tensions and obstacles in transforming food systems, highlighting the need to manage concerns such as fears of food price rises, job losses, policy siloes, global inequalities, and entrenched vested interests. It emphasizes the importance of addressing these concerns to facilitate change and ensure that the benefits of food system transformation can be realized. The report also highlights the rising visibility of transforming food systems as a policy priority, as well as the new ambition to seize the opportunities offered by such transformation, as evidenced by the COP28 UAE declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action signed by over 150 countries.