Blog
Food systems sustainability must be prioritized in all its dimensions
© FAO / Nozim Kalandarov
The use of science and new technologies in food systems dates back at least 10,000 years to the earliest days of agriculture and farmers and communities have long been at the forefront of innovation in the sector. To ensure that food systems can continue to serve their many overlapping roles in society – such as delivering food and nutrition, providing livelihoods, enriching cultural practices, and supporting ecological renewal – it is imperative to ensure that science and innovation prioritize sustainability.
By making sustainability a guiding principle for its Science and Innovation Strategy, the FAO understands that without measures to uphold the three pillars of sustainability – environmental, social and economic – within food systems, they will not be able to effectively fulfill their roles in society. Sustainability is thus interconnected and indivisible with all the other principles underpinning the strategy.
But what exactly does each of the three pillars of sustainability entail? What kind of record do food systems have on these fronts? And what is the role of science and innovation in promoting sustainable food systems?
Upholding the environmental dimension of sustainability requires safeguarding the earth’s capacity to produce. Food systems, in short, must enrich nature rather than cause damage to it that can undermine our ability to feed not just today’s population, but all future generations.
Sustainability’s societal dimension is equally important to protect. Food systems, put simply, must work for people. They support health and well-being by providing nutritious foods, are deeply interconnected with cultures, and are vital to ensuring that societies flourish.
The economic dimension of sustainability is vital to ensure that food is and continues to be accessible and affordable for all, while at the same time supporting the livelihoods of over a third of humanity. To achieve this goal, food markets must be diverse and resilient, and within reach for all.
Although the aims behind these principles – as well as their interconnected nature – are well-defined, it has become painfully clear that food systems are failing to achieve them, prompting widespread calls for transformative change. Science and innovation are central to widening our understanding of how food systems operate in unsustainable ways, just as they are important in defining potential pathways to improve the situation.
While the technological innovations behind modern industrial agriculture were intended to increase food production and reduce hunger, scientific assessments, such as the IPCC’s sixth assessment report, have revealed their unintended environmental consequences that undercut the earth’s ability to provide food for all. It is widely recognized today that the dominant industrial methods of food production – based on fossil fuel reliant mechanization, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, engineered seeds, and monoculture farms – are not ecologically sustainable. Food systems today are responsible for around one third of climate-warming greenhouse gases, contribute to significant agrobiodiversity loss, damage soil health, and cause chemical pollution, among other environmental impacts. When the ecological base on which food systems are built is undermined, so are food systems.
The social and cultural embeddedness of food systems is also being increasingly dislocated in the current era, resulting in a range of social, health and political implications. In conflict situations, for example, food systems face devastating consequences as people are displaced from their traditional lands and livelihoods, food access collapses, and cultural practices and access to traditional foods are disrupted, contributing to social breakdowns. Another example of cultural and social decoupling in food systems is the rise of ultra-processed foods, which contributes to the disruption of traditional diets and cultures and diminishes the healthiness of diets. When the social and cultural base of food systems is weakened in these ways, it becomes difficult for human societies to flourish.
In terms of food economies, the warning signs are also flashing brightly. Today, over 700 million people on the planet face hunger, a third of the world’s population is unable to afford a healthy diet. These troubling outcomes are a signal that economic systems are failing in many contexts to deliver adequate food to all. One important factor that is gaining growing attention in scientific assessments is that food systems suffer from high degrees of market concentration in which just a few firms control large portions of food supply chains. Highly concentrated markets can lead to distortions and inefficiencies that undercut people’s ability to access food at affordable prices as well as fair remuneration for their work within food systems as producers, processors, traders and workers. It also can hinder the ability of new entrants, including small and medium-scale enterprises that may have new and more sustainable innovations to offer, from being able to compete on fair terms.
By featuring sustainability as a key guiding principle, FAO’s Science and Innovation Strategy signals that it understands the huge challenges facing food systems along all three dimensions and is committed to reversing patterns of unsustainability. If it is to meet this objective, it is important for it to utilize science and innovation not only to promote novel technologies that might potentially mitigate the drivers of unsustainability, but also to assess those proposed solutions for unintended consequences that could introduce new dynamics that threaten sustainability in all its dimensions.
Many of the shortcomings of the industrial food production system were foreseen at the time that new innovations were first introduced, but the warnings from scientists were not always heeded. As early as the 1930s-40s – nearly a century ago – plant scientists pointed out the potential threats to agricultural biodiversity from seed hybridization and soil experts cautioned that soil health could be undermined by synthetic fertilizers. Likewise, by the 1960s-70, nutritionists warned of the dangers of drifting toward more processed diets, while social scientists pointed out the significance of societal stability and fair market structures for food systems to be accessible to all.
Yet over much of the past century, the push for increased food production and processing often overrode these concerns – often serving the agenda of powerful political and economic interests – to the detriment of longer-term sustainability goals.
At this current juncture – there is much more attention being paid to issues of sustainability in food systems. However, economic and political interests in the sector remain strong, and threaten to again override sustainability concerns. Now more than ever it is vital that the FAO prioritize sustainability principles by using science to evaluate past, present, and future dynamics within food systems to ensure we understand the consequences of innovations and avoid introducing yet more problems that are even more challenging to address.
Jennifer Clapp is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability in the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo. She has published widely on the global governance of problems that arise at the intersection of the global economy, food systems, and the natural environment. Her most recent book is Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why it Matters (MIT Press, 2025). Professor Clapp is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), and a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the UN Food Systems Coordination Hub. Professor Clapp has received numerous awards for her interdisciplinary research.
