Highlights:

The question addressed in this brief concerns how can governments pursue food systems transformation in the face of severe financial constraints, financial shocks and food-price crises. Transformation is urgently needed to address long-term goals around addressing hunger and malnutrition, as well as making food systems sustainable and resilient. The brief shows that many important changes to food systems can be implemented which are low cost, or even cost-neutral.

The brief identifies five categories of action which can enable or drive change or address important barriers to change:

1/ Improving governance of food systems.

• A shift in policy mindset and responsibility: refocusing food policy agendas from a focus on agricultural output to increasing the efficiency of entire food systems.
• Ensuring coherence of policy actions across governments supports the transformation of food systems at scale. A specific suggestion is to empower cross-party and cross-ministerial working groups to identify ways to reconcile trade-offs across sectors (including agriculture, health and environment), as well as balancing short-term gains against long-term losses for different constituencies.
• Driving change from the top. Leadership from the top is essential to break down siloed government departments and agencies.
• Setting common targets. The establishment of cross-government targets could be used to incentivise different parts of government to work within a jointly-owned delivery strategy.
• Promoting pro-poor growth. Pro-poor growth matters, not just to reduce the vulnerability of poor populations to malnutrition, but also to help them develop resilience to harder times.
• Empowering sub-national and city authorities to assume practical responsibilities for the transition of food systems.
• Adopting the principle of not allowing current crises to prejudice long-term goals.
• Changing attitudes to the informal food sector. Taking a more positive attitude to support the informal food sector could provide substantial benefits in urban settings.
• Committing to use the best available science and evidence to forge more effective and more coherent roadmaps for the food system transition – at sub-national, national and global scales.

2/ Repurposing and leveraging governmental resources – within and beyond food systems.

• Repurposing support for food production and food systems more generally. Repurposing support to farmers in favour of foods with lower environmental footprints and higher nutritional value could engender better outcomes in terms of nutritional health, environmental outcomes, and economic growth –all at effectively zero cost to governments.
• Leveraging public-sector food purchases.
• Embedding nutrition into strategies for improving health and wellbeing.
• Rebalancing research (national and international). Research relating to food production needs to be balanced by research on post-farmgate parts of the food system and focusing on nutrient-rich foods. Specific priorities include actions that would increase the supply of nutrient-rich foods through sustainable and resilient farming systems, research into ‘what works’ in terms of delivering food system transformation, and research to identify the most effective ways to influence dietary choices of consumers in LMIC settings.

3/ Leveraging food industry and business resources.

• Businesses in the food sector should be encouraged – or compelled – to publish progress towards clear and meaningful targets. That needs to be a key consideration as governments weigh the balance they should strike between incentives and regulation, for example in areas such as marketing of ultra-processed foods to consumers in general, and children in particular.

4/ Harnessing the power of consumers to drive change.

• Using policy-based behavioural nudges to influence dietary choices. Examples of specific actions include: public advertisement campaigns, encouraging less food waste, and greater fruit and vegetable consumption, initiatives to improve food package labelling, inclusion of nutrient and environmental facts on restaurants menus, promoting the use of up-to-date food-based dietary guidelines and improving the nutritional quality of foods supplied in institutional settings (for example, schools). A more assertive form of intervention would be to use consumer-level taxes and subsidies on key food categories.
• Reducing food loss and waste. Food losses in the food chain may be large in LMICs. While some actions to reduce food losses are likely to be cash intensive (for example, investing in cold chains), other are less so. One example concerns encouraging and establishing circular loops that repurpose wasted food as valuable products within the food chain. 

5/ Improving LMIC access to finance to catalyse transformation.

• All development partners should redouble their efforts to work together to press for increased international finance for climate change adaptation and countering biodiversity loss. HICs have already committed to provide US$ 100 billion per year to LMICs for climate change mitigation and adaptation. Although a substantial amount, this remains a fraction of what is required, and the fund is still under-delivering by around US$ 17 billion each year. In the case of biodiversity, the COP15 Biological Diversity Convention has a target to mobilise, by 2030, of at least US$ 200 billion per year in domestic and international biodiversity-related funding from all sources – public and private.
• Encouraging banks and other financial institutions to rethink how they finance food system innovations.
• Using innovations to promote better access to finance for women farmers, with the aim of addressing discriminatory practices that prevail in many contexts.
• LMICs working together to persuade the donor community to rebalance some of its investments to support food system transformation.
• Establishing linkages with the World Bank and other multilateral agencies to collaborate on modifying international poverty line and purchasing power parity calculations. The aim would be to update the calculation of national poverty lines in ways that pay attention to the affordability of healthy diets, as recommended by national guidelines and based on current national food prices.
• Making better use of available financial assessment tools.