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Why the Great Food Transformation may not happen – A deep-dive into our food systems’ political economy, controversies and politics of evidence

June 2022
World Development 154(2):105881

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.105881

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Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research

This paper explores the conditions under which the changes leading to the Great Transformation of food systems called upon by a growing number of international experts and development agencies, will (or not) happen. After discussing the meanings of ‘transformation’ in the specific context of food systems, we draw on different elements of political economy to show how various self-reinforcing dynamics are contributing to lock food systems in their current unsustainable trajectories. Those include the concentration of economic and market power in the hands of the Big Food transnational corporations but also other actors’ ideology, policy incoherence, national interests or culturally-embedded aspirations, which together create irreconcilable trade-offs and tensions between divergent individual and societal objectives and prevent the system from aligning toward a more sustainable trajectory. In this context, while innovation is often presented as a ‘game-changer’, we show how the current profit-driven nature of its evolutionary selection creates a random, adirectional, process incapable of steering food systems towards sustainability. We argue that unless those different issues are tackled all together in a resolutely normative, global, and prescriptive manner in which science would have a new role to play, there are serious risks that the Great Transformation will not happen. Based on these analyses, we identify pathways to move the systems past its current locks-in and steer it toward its long-awaited sustainable transformation. In doing so we demonstrate that what is needed is not just a transformation of the food systems themselves, but a transformation of the governance of those food systems as well.

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Why the Great Food Transformation may not happen – A deep-dive into

our food systems’ political economy, controversies and politics of

evidence

Christophe Béné

Alliance of Bioversity and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, CIAT, Km 17 Recta Cali-Palmira, Zip Code 763537 Cali, Valle del Cauca, Colombia

article info

Article history:

Keywords:

Technological innovations

Food system governance

Food system sustainability

Transformation

Power and politics

abstract

This paper explores the conditions under which the changes leading to the Great Transformation of food

systems called upon by a growing number of international experts and development agencies, will (or

not) happen. After discussing the meanings of ‘transformation’ in the speciﬁc context of food systems,

we draw on different elements of political economy to show how various self-reinforcing dynamics

are contributing to lock food systems in their current unsustainable trajectories. Those include the con-

centration of economic and market power in the hands of the Big Food transnational corporations but

also other actors’ ideology, policy incoherence, national interests or culturally-embedded aspirations,

which together create irreconcilable trade-offs and tensions between divergent individual and societal

objectives and prevent the system from aligning toward a more sustainable trajectory. In this context,

while innovation is often presented as a ‘game-changer’, we show how the current proﬁt-driven nature

of its evolutionary selection creates a random, adirectional, process incapable of steering food systems

towards sustainability. We argue that unless those different issues are tackled all together in a resolutely

normative, global, and prescriptive manner in which science would have a new role to play, there are

serious risks that the Great Transformation will not happen. Based on these analyses, we identify path-

ways to move the systems past its current locks-in and steer it toward its long-awaited sustainable trans-

formation. In doing so we demonstrate that what is needed is not just a transformation of the food

systems themselves, but a transformation of the governance of those food systems as well.

Ó2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.

1. Introduction

The need for a ‘‘Great Transformation” of our food systems is

widely recognized among the scientiﬁc community. In its 2019

report, the EAT-Lancet Commission for instance presents this

transformation as a necessary condition to restore the sustainabil-

ity of our planet:.

‘‘(...) global food systems can provide win–win diets to everyone

by 2050 and beyond. However, achieving this goal will require

(...) nothing less than a Great Food Transformation.” (Willett

et al., 2019, p. 448, our emphasis)

Prior to the EAT-Lancet report, similar calls have been made by

other high-proﬁle expert groups and individual scholars (GSDR,

2015; IPES 2016; Haddad et al., 2016; HLPE 2017; Caron et al.,

2018, etc.). By ‘‘transformation”, those different experts generally

refer to the scale/magnitude of the change, but also to its

normative nature. Haddad and his colleagues, for instance, argue:

‘‘Piecemeal action will not do: the trends are so large and

interconnected that the entire food system needs overhauling”

(2016, p. 31) –referring here to the scale of the transformation -

while its normative element relates to the intention to build a

‘‘better” system, i.e., one ‘‘which is inextricably knitted with the

Sustainable Development Goals” (op. cit).

Yet, along with the urgency (Webb et al., 2020), the challenges

that such systemic change would induce are are not so much about

the technological innovations that would be necessary to support

the changes, but more about the governance, political-economy

constraints and policy trade-offs that are inherent to the system

and would need to be addressed (Béné et al., 2020; IPES & ETC

group, 2021).

The justiﬁcations for such food systems’ great transformation

are undisputed: in 2019, 690 million people were still undernour-

ished and 340 million children estimated to suffer from micronu-

trient deﬁciency while, at the same time, 2.1 billion adults were

diagnosed overweight or obese (FAO et al., 2020). Food systems

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.105881

0305-750X/Ó2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.

E-mail address: c.bene@cgiar.org

World Development 154 (2022) 105881

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

World Development

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddev

have also been recognized to be major sources of global environ-

mental degradation (soil erosion, natural resources depletion,

deforestation, etc.) (Ranganathan et al., 2016), and the cause of

30% or more total greenhouse gas emission (IPCC, 2019).

Beyond their nutritional/health and environmental unsustain-

ability, food systems are also highly criticized for their poor perfor-

mances in domains such as social justice, human rights and equity:

agriculture and agri-food industry are indeed the economic sector

with the world highest prevalence of forced and child labour

(Hodal, 2015; IPES, 2017; USDL, 2020).

Against this background, the objective of this paper is to iden-

tify and weigh the conditions that would be necessary for the food

systems’ Great Transformation to take place. The analysis is struc-

tured around the following research question: ‘‘What are the most

important barriers and locks-in which contribute to hinder societal

discussions and reduce the abilities of the different actors to

engage in the necessary process leading to food systems’ Great

Transformation?”.

Using a slightly provocative title, we argue that unless a combi-

nation of stringent conditions is fulﬁlled simultaneously, there are

reasons to believe that this Great Transformation will not happen.

Already, a number of scholars have expressed doubts about the

ability of the system to transform. Their reasoning builds essen-

tially around political economy arguments. To paraphrase them,

the extremely high concentration of most agri-food industry’s

resources in the hands of a few, very powerful, transnational food

corporations (hereafter referred to as the ‘‘Big Food”) is greatly lim-

iting countries’ domestic policy spaces and impeding the capacities

of governments and other legitimate stakeholders to act

(Bernstein, 2016; IPES, 2017). The rationale is that these powerful

incumbents have very strong ﬁnancial interests to maintain the

status quo and make sure that the current trend as we observe

it, continue. The fear is therefore that those strong politico-

economic forces may lock in the system and prevent or delay the

structural changes that are deemed necessary to achieve, or to

recover, food systems’ sustainability (ETC group, 2013; IPES, 2015).

This paper argues however that combined to those political

economy considerations, other lenses are necessary to compre-

hend the situation appropriately and, importantly, to identify path-

ways to move the systems passed those current locks-in. In short,

we posit that food system transformation is not just about private

sector’s interests versus public health or environmental considera-

tions; instead it is about the perceptions, believes and views of

individual consumers, institutions, public and private policy-

makers, investors, suppliers, interacting all at the same time in a

space where structuring factors others than power and dominance

are important, including social values, cultural identities or even

knowledge and expertise.

More speciﬁcally, we posit in this paper that four major, self-

reinforcing, forces are responsible for locking the food system in

its current unsustainable trajectory and will need to be addressed

simultaneously if we want a ‘true’ Great Transformation to take

place and contribute on time to the SDGs. Those are: (i) the resis-

tance to change raised by transnational corporations and their

shareholders in an attempt to maintain the system in its current

direction; (ii) the divergence (or misalignment) observed in the

interests and values of the other legitimate actors’ (governments

and consumers) which prevent those actors from being able to

redirect the system into a more sustainable trajectory; (iii) the fact

that technological innovation (arguably the main engine of the

Great Transformation) is by nature driven by proﬁt and not by sus-

tainability; and (iv) the failure of science to play its role in this crit-

ical socio-techno-environmental debate, failure that can be related

to what we will refer to as dysfunctional ‘politics of evidence’.

The rest of this paper will start by clarifying the concept of

transformation as used in the food system literature, making in

particular the semantic distinction between the term ‘‘transforma-

tion” as employed until recently in the literature to describe the

scale of the changes that have characterized food systems over

the last three decades (e.g. Burch & Lawrence, 2005) and the more

normative interpretation proposed more recently to refer this time

not just to ‘drastic changes’ but to ‘changes that lead to an

improved system’ (in the sense of transformative change) (e.g.

Haddad et al., 2016; Salomaa & Juhola, 2020).

We will then turn to our research question. However, instead of

framing it using a conventional political economy approach, we

propose to adopt a broader framework, intermixing traditional

principles of political economy (e.g. role of dominant actors and

unequal distribution of power) with three other lines of argu-

ments; the ﬁrst one derives from a more sociological interpretation

of politics where political issues are embedded into a wider soci-

etal context and other modes of political inﬂuence are considered

(Orum & Dale, 2009; Clemens, 2016). To ground the discussion,

our argument will be articulated around the highly debated issue

of animal-based protein transition (Winders & Ransom, 2019;

Lundström, 2019). The second line of argument will consider the

role that technological innovation is generally expected to play in

societal transition, namely that of ‘driver of change’ (e.g., Geels &

Schot, 2007) and revisit this assumption in the particular case of

food systems. For this, we intend to build on some of the recent

analyses proposed in the sustainability transition literature (e.g.,

El Bilali, 2019) and associated literature on innovation and socio-

technical change (Avelino et al., 2016). Finally, the third part of

the analysis will draw on the literature on politics of knowledge,

and the way in which knowledge and science, through the ‘‘power

of expertise” (Reed, 1996), are being used (or mis-used) in policy

setting (Béné, 2005; Powell, 2006; Bosch-Capblanch et al., 2012).

We will show in particular how this politics of evidence and the

related evidence-based policy agenda (Broadbent, 2012) can con-

tribute to work against the process of societal transformation.

The last section of the paper will then revisit these key locks-in

that will have been shown to contribute to hinder the abilities of

the different actors to engage in the necessary transformation pro-

cesses, with the ambition to identify avenues that can help move

the system beyond those locks-in and lead it, through a Great

Transformation, to more sustainable trajectories.

2. Food system transformations

In this section, we discuss the meaning of ‘transformation’ in

the speciﬁc context of food systems. We will show that beyond

its original meaning of ‘substantial change’ used in the more gen-

eral literature, two more speciﬁc ways in which transformation is

used in relation to food systems can be identiﬁed: (i) the ﬁrst is

one already discussed abundantly in the global environment

change literature, e.g., O’Brien 2012, where politics of change are

stressed and ‘transformation’ often means challenging the current

status quo. ii) the second, more recent, interpretation, is one where

transformation is given a normative nature, often with the idea

that transformation can lead to ‘improved’ system (Webb et al.,

2020).

2.1. Food systems have always been transforming...

The common deﬁnition of transformation is one that refers to

fundamental, drastic changes (as opposed to incremental changes)

which, usually, involve interactions between human and biophys-

ical system components (Brand, 2016; Hölscher et al., 2018).

Importantly, transformation in this original sense ‘‘describes the

depth of change, but not its origin, breadth or trajectory” (Pelling

et al. 2015, p. 115); and, as such, can –like resilience in this original

C. Béné World Development 154 (2022) 105881

sense (see Béné & Doyen, 2018) – be associated with, or lead to,

negative outcomes (e.g., Butzer, 2012).

In the context of food systems, the term transformation under-

stood in this common meaning was already in use in the mid-

2000s (e.g., Pingali 2004). In effect, one of the ﬁrst references to

‘‘food system transformation” was that used to describe the struc-

tural changes that took place in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, as a

result of what Reardon et al. (2003) coined as the

‘‘supermarketization” of food systems, that is, the rapid establish-

ment of foreign-owned supermarket chains in those regions.

Many other instances of ‘transformation’-understood as epi-

sodes of major structural changes- are found in the literature,

including the ‘homogenization’ of crop plants and food supply

(Khoury et al., 2014); the ‘westernization’ of Asian diets (Pingali,

2007); or the wide use of genetically modiﬁed organisms (GMOs)

(Bawa & Anilakumar, 2013). Arguably, the biggest ‘transformation’

that food systems have experienced in the last 50 years has been

the adoption of high-yielding varieties in Asia and Latin America,

referred to as the Green Revolution

The important point is that food systems have always been

transforming and will continue to do so in the future. Yet those

‘‘transformations” (be it the supermarketization of the retail sector,

the westernization of diets, the homogenization of crops, or even

the Green Revolution) which for their main part have been the

result of, or driven by, technological innovations, did not bring only

positive outcomes, and in many cases led to less healthy or less

sustainable food systems.

2.2. Transformation as a political process

In recent years, the concept of transformation, alone or some-

times together with the concept of transition (Avelino et al.,

2016; Hölscher et al., 2018), has been given a more political conno-

tation (Leach et al., 2018). Scholars such as O’Brien (2012) or

Pelling (2010) made clear that transformation, by the very fact that

it brings changes, cannot occur without contestation of the under-

lying social, political, and economic structures that had created and

maintained the existing status quo. For those authors and many

others (e.g., Meadowcroft, 2011; Scoones et al., 2015), transforma-

tion is therefore inherently political, and understanding the condi-

tions that lead to such transformation cannot be done without

recognizing the contested nature of the process and addressing

the power relations that underlie it.

In the literature focusing on food system, this political dimen-

sion is not yet fully established. With few exceptions (Harris

et al., 2019; Webb et al., 2020; Dekeyser et al., 2020; Béné et al.,

2020), papers that discuss the pathway to food system transforma-

tion still focus essentially on what needs to be done –often from a

technical perspective (e.g., Willett et al., 2019) – not on how to do

it. In sum, the contested dimension of food systems transformation

is not yet fully recognized (Anderson & Leach, 2019). Part of the

reason for this is that, at the difference of the literature on global

environmental changes (e.g. Feola, 2015), socio-ecological systems

(e.g. Westley et al., 2011) or sustainable transition (e.g. Geels,

2014) where this political dimension is now well established, the

discussion on food system transformation is still very much framed

around narratives dominated by nutritionists, and public and plan-

etary health scientists (e.g. Willett et al., 2019), with very few

social/political scientists invited to contribute to the debate

(Caron et al., 2018; Béné et al., 2020).

2.3. The normative element of transformation

In relation to, but distinct from this political dimension, another

facet entered the transformation discourse recently. This is the

normative component that is progressively attached to the concept

of transformation. Departing fundamentally from the common

meaning of transformation described as a radical but random

change, this normative discourse presents transformation as a

deliberative, purposive process aimed at improving the system

and its outcomes. As such, transformation is no longer just endured

or experienced, but wanted and planned, as it is viewed as the ‘‘so-

lution” (O’Brien, 2012, p.4).

Unsurprisingly, this new interpretation has already been appro-

priated by policy-makers and international actors. The United

Nations launched the sustainable development goals (SDGs) for

instance under the auspices of ‘‘transforming our world” toward

more ‘‘dignity and equality and in a healthy environment” (UN

2015, p.5). Similar positive interpretations of transformation are

now found in a growing number of international (or national) doc-

uments, leading some scholars to claim that transformation has

become a new buzzword in political discourses (Feola, 2015;

Hölscher et al., 2018).

In the food system literature, this normative element is also

becoming ubiquitous. The Global Panel on Agriculture and Food

Systems for Nutrition for instance explicitly links food system

transformation to the Sustainable Development Goals (Haddad

et al., 2016) while the EAT-Lancet report argues that ‘‘The present

unhealthy, unequal, unsustainable food system can be transformed

into an improved system”(Willett et al., 2019 p.478 –our emphasis).

While reviewing the literature on food systems outcomes,

Stefanovic et al. (2020, p.6) identiﬁed several pieces that discuss

transformative strategies that claim to facilitate the transition

toward ‘‘a regenerative and resilient, agrobiodiverse, food secure,

equitable and healthy [food system] with higher well-being of

rural communities”.

In sum, within 20 years, we passed from an interpretation of

food system transformations close to the original common mean-

ing, referring to the scale and magnitude of the change but also

recognizing the unpredictability (and possibility undesirability)

of the outcomes –as in Popkin & Reardon (2018) account of Obesity

and the food system transformation in Latin America- (our emphasis),

to a more positive re-interpretation of the concept where ‘‘trans-

formative change [leads to] substantial and widely distributed

beneﬁts [to] both society and ecosystems‘‘ (Marshall et al., 2012,

p.2); in other terms, where transformation is not seen as referring

to problems of the past, but (more rhetorically) as solutions of the

future.

3. Locked-in by Big Food

In this section, we will adopt a relatively traditional political

economy approach and show how the concentration of resources

in the hands of the largest seed, agrichemical and agri-food corpo-

rations, as well as large retailers (what is called the ‘‘Big Food” see,

e.g., Stuckler & Nestle, 2012) constitutes the ﬁrst of three major

barriers to the Great Transformation. This will speak directly to

the ‘‘Transformation as a political process” section discussed above

where it was argued that, by its very nature, transformation chal-

lenges the status quo and, as such, is expected to be resisted by the

main incumbents (IPES, 2015). This line of argument is not new or

speciﬁc to food system. It has been, and still continues to be dis-

cussed for instance in the case of the green energy transforma-

tion/transition where dominant actors in the oil industry and

related sectors actively resist the necessary shift to petrol-free

economy (Phelan et al., 2012; Geels, 2014). Relying on the few pub-

Interestingly, this transformation was not called transformation but Revolution,in

reference to its underlying geopolitical motivation by the US to counteract agrarian

reforms triggered by the ‘‘Red Revolution” and the spread of communism in what was

called at that time the underdeveloped world (Patel, 2013).

C. Béné World Development 154 (2022) 105881

licly available data compiled by others (ETC group, 2013; Money

et al., 2015; IPES, 2017; FoEI, 2019), our contribution in this section

will be to synthesize the situation in the case of the agri-food

industry. We will highlight the degree of extreme market concen-

tration that characterizes food systems

and rely on the numerous

attempts made by the Big Food to weaken or even oppose regula-

tions and policies intended to redress the current market failures

of the food system, to demonstrate their toxic inﬂuence on the gov-

ernance of the system.

3.1. The Big Food and its concentrated power

In 2005, pursuing her earlier work on food regime (Friedmann &

McMichael, 1989), Friedmann (2005) suggested that a new

corporate-food regime had emerged since the 1970s, characterized

by the dominance of transnational retailers and agro-food compa-

nies, thereby creating a ‘‘new order” in the world food system –see

also McMichael 2009; Pritchard 2009. The premise of this postu-

late, which emerges from a political economy perspective, is that

the global food system is now characterized by an extremely high

concentration of power in the hands of few transnational agri-food

corporations, leading to the quasi-absolute control, by those actors,

of the governance of food systems (Lang & Barling, 2012; IPES,

2015; Clapp, 2021). Strongly embedded in a productivist paradigm,

the focus of this new regime is on producing large amounts of stan-

dardized food ‘efﬁciently’, which are then directed essentially,

although not exclusively, to rapidly growing or emerging con-

sumers’ markets in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs)

(Stuckler et al., 2011). Boosted by mass-marketing campaigns, this

rapid expansion in LMICs has also beneﬁtted from substantial for-

eign investment (Hawkes, 2005).

The level of market concentration

reached by the Big Food in

recent years is unprecedented (Clapp, 2021). According to ETC Group

investigations conducted in the early 2010s, the world’s 10 leading

pesticide companies are estimated to control 94% of the world sales.

Yet, six of those (Syngenta-ChemChina, Bayer-Monsanto, BASF; Lima-

grain; Dow-DuPont, and KWS-AG) are also six of the biggest seed

companies (Agropages, 2019) and together, those control more than

75% of all private sector crop research (Money, 2018). In farm

machinery business, three companies (John Deere, CNH Industrial

NV, and AGCO) account for around 77% of worldwide sales (Financial

Times, 2014). In meat production, four ﬁrms account for 97% of poul-

try Research & Development and for broilers, three companies (Tyson

Foods, EW Group, Groupe Grimaud) control 95% of the market shares,

while the same three companies supply 95% of the commercial

breeding stock for those broilers (ETC group, 2013). In the retail

industry, the supermarket sector has grown to the point where, for

instance, more than 70% of UK grocery purchasing is concentrated

in four main supermarket chains: Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Mor-

risons. Similar patterns are observed in other high-income countries

(SAPEA, 2020). Fig. 1 provides a graphic summary of the level of con-

centration of power observed across the agri-food industry.

Part of this unprecedented concentration has been achieved

through mega-mergers across the whole agri-food industry

(Howard, 2016; FoEI, 2019). Those operations generally involve

substantial amount of capitals. In 2015 for instance, Heinz and

Kraft Foods merged, creating the world’s ﬁfth-largest food and bev-

erage company combining 13 brands valued more than $500 mil-

lion each. In the same year, Dow Chemical and DuPont merged

to create the world’s biggest chemical company, valued at $130 bil-

lion. The goal of these ﬁnancial operations is thus to increase the

control over a wider range of agricultural inputs and activities

ranging from the production of fertilizers, pesticides, livestock

genetics and farming machinery, all the way down to the distribu-

tion of agro-commodities, food processing and retail (IPES, 2017;

FoEI, 2019).

3.2. Visible and hidden inﬂuence, and how Big Food uses it to maintain

the status quo

The effects of those mega-mergers and the subsequent shift of

the centre of gravity of the global food system governance materi-

alizes in two ways; one relatively trackable way, essentially

through power of inﬂuence; and one more ‘hidden’ way where

those corporations use their R&D resources to protect their own

assets and investments -what is called ‘defensive R&D’- and pre-

vent any disruptive innovation from reaching the market.

3.2.1. Concentration of resources, corporate political activities and

power of inﬂuence

A ﬁrst part of the (visible) way the Big Food inﬂuences food sys-

tems’ governance is transmitted through the weight that any deci-

sion made by those giants has on the system itself: as the 2015

IPES ‘Barriers to food system reform’ report put it clearly: ‘‘When

up to 90% of the global grain trade is controlled by four agribusi-

ness ﬁrms, a change in sourcing policy by a big player may become

de facto regulation across the entire sector” (IPES 2015, p. 4). This

inﬂuence often goes beyond the sector itself and can have substan-

tial impact not only on the economy of entire countries or regions,

but also on the lives of hundreds of millions of households who are

affected sometimes in a dramatic manner (an illustration here

would be the documented cases of farmer suicides in India, argu-

ably triggered by some of the Big Food actors’ commercial strate-

gies around seed monopolization -see Thomas & De Tavernier,

2017 for a discussion).

A second aspect of this Big Food visible inﬂuence is through its

lobbying activities. Lobbying, which usually involves direct, face-

to-face contact with government ofﬁcials, may also include what

Mialon et al. (2015) refer to as ‘‘corporate political activities” such

as disseminating ‘speciﬁc’ information; providing ﬁnancial incen-

tives to politicians, political parties and other decision makers; or

challenging proposed policies in the news-media and in court

(see e.g. Clapp & Fuchs, 2009; Hendrickson & James, 2016). Numer-

ous studies have documented those political activities taking place

in ‘‘grey area”

and the many attempts made by Big Food actors to

inﬂuence policy-makers in ways that are misaligned with public’s

interests (IPES, 2015), for instance when the US restaurant industry

used its political inﬂuence for several months in 2006–2007 to try to

weaken a series of state and federal legislations aimed at compelling

restaurant chains to post the calorie information of the food they

were serving (Bernell, 2010)

. Beyond this example, our intention

In doing so, we strongly dispute the position of those who claim that ‘‘No one

controls even important sub-systems, much less the whole [agri-food system]”

(Barrett et al., 2020, p.1).

Market concentration traditionally refers to the share of market sales held by the

largest ﬁrms in a particular sector. The concentration ratio is the main indicator used

to assess market competitiveness by evaluating the total market share of a given

number of ﬁrms relative to the whole market size. A market is generally deemed no

longer competitive when four ﬁrms control more than 40% (Bryce 1978;Shepherd

and Shepherd, 2004).

For instance over the last 10 years John Deere, the world’s leading farm

machinery company, formed alliances not just with other machinery ﬁrms (horizon-

tal integration), but also with all six of the dominant seed/pesticide companies

(vertical integration).

OECD talks about ‘‘grey area” between legitimate advocacy activities on the one

hand and illegal inﬂuence-seeking activities such as bribery on the other (OECD 2021,

p.90).

This behavior has some clear similarities with the case of the Tobacco industry

(Brownell and Warner, 2009;Stuckler and Nestle, 2012) which, for decades, had tried

to deny or to hide the harmful effects of smoking on human health despite the

mounting scientiﬁc evidence accumulated for more than 30 years on this issue

(Sharma et al., 2010).

C. Béné World Development 154 (2022) 105881

is to highlight the deliberate attempts by the transnational agri-food

corporations to inﬂuence lawmakers in ways that are often question-

able or may even involve illegal inﬂuence-seeking activities such as

bribery or price ﬁxing. The fertilizer industry or the grain trading

companies for instance have been suspected to operate as de facto

cartels/oligopoly and ﬁxing prices since the 1950s (Murphy et al.,

2012; Gnutzmann & Spiewanowski, 2016). Oligopolistic behaviour

has also been observed in food manufacturers (e.g., chocolate)

involving transnational corporations: Cadbury, Mars, Nestlé

(Culliney, 2013).

3.2.2. Concentration as a barrier to transformative innovations

The discourse of the agri-food industry –backed up by the

orthodox economic theory– is that concentration and mergers

are ‘good’ not just because they can reduce costs, but also because

they allow economy of scale in resources allocated to R&D and

therefore, in theory, boost innovation. From a distance, this rheto-

ric seems coherent and it is correct that the Big Food sits on signif-

icant R&D resources, especially when compared to international

public research on agriculture

. In reality, however, mergers and

consolidation don’t necessarily translate into more resources allo-

cated to R&D and innovation as the R&D budgets of large ﬁrms are

frequently downsized as a result of consolidation (Lynch & Chazan,

2016).

Evidence from a range of sectors also suggests that the econo-

mies of scale achieved through mergers rarely leads to transforma-

tive innovation (Adams & Brock, 2004). Investigation by the US

Federal Trade Commission for instance found that level of concen-

tration and level of innovation are generally negatively correlated

(USFTC, 2003). The explanation for this relates to the concept of

‘defensive R&D’ where ‘‘resources are diverted (...) into the

defence of existing products rather than into investment in new

ideas; [thus] instead of fueling innovation, [defensive R&D] are

used to keep ‘old’ products or substances on the market.” (ERF,

2008, pp.1–2). Empirical data from the agri-food sector perfectly

illustrate this: while the volume of R&D ofﬁcially invested by the

sector may be substantial, the scope of innovations that derived

from this R&D remains strikingly narrow. In the last 50 years, the

number of domesticated species which seed companies have

focused on was reduced to less than 200 (from initially more than

30 times this number), and almost all investments are now on no

more than a dozen crops (IPES, 2017). Likewise, in the livestock

sector, the industry has narrowed its innovations to ﬁve species

—poultry, pigs, bovines, sheep and goats —and roughly 100 breeds

(ETC Group, 2013), while in crop chemicals, the number of new

active ingredients undergoing R&D decreased by 60% between

2000 and 2012 (McDougall, 2013). Recent trends suggest that

although the number of patents related to agri-food innovation

has increased, the majority of those do not represent new break-

throughs (IPES, 2017) and, instead, reﬂect ‘‘patent overgreening”

In the US, three ﬁrms (DuPont, Monsanto, Syngenta) accounted for

nearly three quarters of all US patents issued for crop cultivars

between 1982 and 2007 (McDougall, 2013), most of them being part

of this overgreening strategy –see also IPES (2017).

In sum, instead of being a source of innovations, the largest

agri-food corporations direct most of their resources at protecting

their own assets and investments, resisting changes and prevent-

ing any new or disruptive innovation from entering the sector, thus

de facto contributing (purposively) to lock the system in its current

status quo.

4. Impossible trade-offs between too divided interests

The previous section draws on traditional political economy to

identify some of the main strategies used by the Big Food to

lock-in the food system. This section will extend this analysis by

adopting a wider, more pluralist interpretation of politics (Orum

& Dale, 2009; Clemens, 2016) which still accounts for the Big Food

actors but also recognizes the central role played by other societal

actors and processes. Through this part of the analysis we intend to

highlight the existence of irreconcilable trade-offs between too

many and too divergent interests, preventing food system actors

from being able to align the system with a more sustainable trajec-

tory. The case of red meat is used as the basis for this discussion.

4.1. An accelerating demand for red meat

When it comes to red meat, we know what it would take to

align food systems with sustainable targets: a greater than 50%

reduction in global consumption of beef, pork and lamb (Willett

Fig. 1. Level of concentration of market power in the agri-food industry. In economics, a rule of thumb is that an oligopoly exists when the top ﬁve ﬁrms in the market

account for more than 60% of total market sales. Data compiled by S. Berkum (WUR) from IPES (2017) and Mooney (2018).

To put this in perspective, in 2013 the combined R&D budgets of the big largest

agrochemical and seed companies, valued at that time around $6.59 billion, was

twenty times bigger than the CGIAR’s $332.2 million expenditures on crop-oriented

research/breeding in the same year (CGIAR, 2013) – information reported in IPES

2017.

Evergreening denotes the use of various strategies by the owner of a given patent

to extend the length of the exclusivity period beyond the 20-year patent term in order

to retain royalties from it and/or to prevent any new ﬁrm from using the

technological innovation included in the patent (Faunce and Lexchin, 2007;Collier,

2013).

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et al., 2019)

. With the exception of sub-Sahara Africa where the

average individual consumption is close to the reference diet intake

suggested in the EAT-Lancet report (30 kcal per day) and excluding

South Asia (and in particular India where red meat is not consumed

due to religion rules), data indicate that in all the other regions of the

world, the consumption of red meat is exceeding the reference diet

intake by a factor of 300% to 600% (Willett et al., 2019).

Yet, despite the need to reduce it by more than half, the global

consumption of meat is still projected to expand in the coming

decades. According to the OECD (2020), beef consumption will

increase by another 76 million tons over the next ten years, while

the global pork consumption will increase by 127 million tons

Overall, red meat consumption is therefore going to continue

growing far beyond its already unsustainable level. Even if high-

income countries have reached some degree of saturation (OECD,

2020), as income continues to rise and life-style to change in

LMICs, so will red meat per capita consumption. In this regard,

what is happening in China is emblematic. While the Time maga-

zine hinted recently: ‘‘How China could change the World by tak-

ing meat off the menu” (Time, 2020), alluding at the pivotal place

that this one country plays in this entire read meat balance, unfor-

tunately, China’s appetite for meat is not falling. On the contrary,

the country, which is already the world’s largest consumer of meat

with about 40.3 million tons of pigmeat consumed in 2020, is

expected to continue on a step increasing trajectory in the future,

as disposable incomes increase and the middle class continues to

expand (OECD, 2020).

Beyond China, the general trend in ‘emerging’ countries is wor-

risome. Overall the annual growth in per capita meat consumption

is projected to double, compared to last decade (OECD, 2020). As

pointed out by many (e.g., Drewnowski & Poulain, 2018; SAPEA,

2020), the factors leading to this higher demand for animal-

based protein are not limited to the simple mechanistic effect of

household purchasing power through income rise; they also

include individual and collective societal aspirations, responses

to desires of (new) identities, social pressure and newly created

preferences, as well as expression of cultural belonging

(Vermeulen et al., 2020).

Many of these factors reinforce each other and lead to individ-

ual and collective food choices that directly and completely go

against the changes that are needed for the food Great transforma-

tion to happen. Some would argue that opposing those negative

trends, many positive changes are also happening; that an alterna-

tive, plant-based protein transition is emerging for instance across

several European countries

, leading to a rise in low-meat diets

(Tziva et al., 2020). Yet, even if these trends are real, they reﬂect only

a very small fringe of the world population, rising from a low base-

line of vegetarians and vegans (Vermeulen et al., 2020). In fact, even

at the EU scale (7% of the world population), these retail trends did

not even made a dent in livestock import and export ﬁgures (OECD,

2018). More importantly, they weigh little against the far bigger

momentum in meat consumption described above, with billions of

consumers across Asia and Africa entering the middle class, thus

driving a projected 74% increase in demand for meat by 2050

(Ranganathan et al., 2016).

The one-million-dollar question then is: How do we expect to

reconcile the need to reduce by half the global consumption of

red meat in the next 20 years when more than 3 billion people

are projected to continue increasing their consumption, driving a

more-than-double increase in demand for meat by 2050? Behind

the pure arithmetics of the question lies however an even deeper

ethical dilemma: who is to decide how to ‘‘impose” those reduc-

tions, even when it is widely acknowledged that our individual

preferences are direct threats to our collective sustainability?

4.2. Not just societal aspirations, governments’ national interests

too...

Fuelled by this growing demand, the production of meat is also

on the rise. The annual global red meat production is projected to

expand by more than 19 million metric tons by 2029, reaching

nearly 345 million tons per year (i.e. 304% of the quantity that

would be needed based on the EAT-Lancet reference diet).

A handful of corporations have come to dominate the meat

industry as it expanded over the past ﬁve decades. Importantly,

these corporations, the largest based in US, China and Brazil, have

not just beneﬁted from the world exponential increase in demand;

they also beneﬁted from substantial support from their respective

governments (Winders & Ransom, 2019). In the US, for instance

Starmer et al. (2006) and Starmer & Wise (2007) estimate that,

between 1997 and 2005, Tyson & Smithﬁeld, two of the largest

agri-food ﬁrms involved in beef and pigmeat industry saved an

estimated US$572 million per year through direct payments pro-

vided by various USDA’s subsidies programs. Likewise, in China,

if grants, subsidized loans, and tax breaks are accounted for, Chi-

nese pork industry receives an estimated US$22 billion per year,

or US$47 per pig (the Economist, 2014). In Brazil, Pigatto &

Pigatto (2015) described how JBS –which is now the world’s largest

meat processor when accounting for beef, pork and poultry-

received substantial ﬁnancial support from the Federal Govern-

ment, including access to very advantageous low-cost loans, in

exchange for the Brazilian government to become a shareholder

of the ﬁrm.

Howard (2016), Schneider (2017) and others (e.g., Peine 2013)

provide detailed accounts of those various interferences of national

governments in the economics and ﬁnance of the ‘‘Big Meat”

industry. At the end, even though, some of those governments

are ofﬁcially ﬁghting the Big Food actors’ oligopolistic behaviours

with one hand (see section 3.2.1), they actively support those same

actors with the other hand. Their own ﬁnancial interests and polit-

ical agenda are becoming so entangled with those of the industry

that it is currently impossible for those governments to reverse

the tide and engage in the type of drastic policy changes that

would be necessary to make the Great Transformation happen.

5. Innovation as an evolutionary process driven by proﬁt, not by

sustainability

‘‘So far, few studies have explored the boundaries of what would be

feasible if the world adopted more disruptive, ‘wild’, game-

changing options that could accelerate progress in many desired

dimensions of food systems simultaneously. Some of these game-

changers are no longer in the realms of imagination; they are

already being developed at considerable pace, reshaping what is

feasible across different sectors‘‘. (Herrero et al., 2020, p. 266)

In this section, we will discuss technological innovation’s role in

relation to food systems and the Great Transformation. Our pre-

mise is that although technological innovation is generally pre-

In this discussion we restrict our argumentation to the upper-bound of the red

meat consumption. We acknowledge that animal-based foods provide a concentrated

source of vitamins and minerals that are necessary for the healthy development of

young children (HLPE, 2017), and therefore that while our argument is centered

around the trend observed in the global consumption of red meat, it does not apply to

those individual households in countries where the consumption of red meat is below

the suggested reference level.

For sheepmeat, the global consumption is projected to increase by ‘only’ 2 million

tons over next 10 years.

For instance, in UK supermarkets reported plant-based products to be their

biggest source of growth in 2018 and wider industry research revealed that products

labelled as ‘vegan’ increased sales by 276% in a year (Waitrose, 2018;WBCSD, 2018).

C. Béné World Development 154 (2022) 105881

sented as the main expected ‘engine’ of the Great Transformation

(as Herrero et al.’s quote illustrates above), the very fact that inno-

vations are themselves intrinsically driven by proﬁt and not by

sustainability prevent them from creating the strong uni-

directionality needed for the Great Transformation to happen.

5.1. Innovation as the engine of changes

While it is recognized that social change and technology devel-

opment are inseparable and have to be analysed accordingly (e.g.,

Scrase & Smith 2009; Avelino et al., 2016), the emphasis has always

been on technological innovation as being the driver of those soci-

etal changes. The literature on socio-technical transitions for

instance has generated many insights into how, when and why

innovation is at the core of most socio-technical change (Geels &

Schot, 2007; El Bilali, 2019). Some of the dominant strands of liter-

ature in this, in particular the multi-level perspective on socio-

technical transitions (MLP), describe how the process of innovation

starts from what is called technological niches, how these innova-

tions are then scaled up to destabilize and eventually displace

incumbent socio-technical regimes, and how a series of landscape

factors are necessary for this change to happen (Geels, 2004; Grin

et al., 2010).

5.2. Random process as opposed to normative choice

These innovations (or ‘‘game changers” as in the UNFSS new

lexicon) have therefore traditionally been at the service of eco-

nomic expansion and societal transformations (Grin et al., 2010;

Moberg et al., 2021). In food systems, we mentioned already sev-

eral of them (e.g., the Green Revolution based on High Yielding

Varieties; the use of GMOs based on genetic engineering tech-

niques, etc.). Yet, having been at the start of these different societal

transformations and shaping the world as we see it, those innova-

tions have also de facto contributed ‘‘massively to the current

resource-intensive, wasteful and fossil fuel-based paradigm of

mass production and mass consumption” (Schot & Steinmueller,

2018, p. 1562) which characterises this same world. In sum, tech-

nological innovations may be part of the solution but they are also

part of the problem -or as Weber & Rohracher, 2012 put it, part of

the ‘‘failures”- thus justifying the reject of this ‘‘fetishism for inno-

vation” (Tyﬁeld et al., 2017, p. 9) which is increasingly observed in

the discourse of many scholars and international organizations in

recent years (e.g. WEF, UNFSS, etc.).

Instead, it is important to keep in mind that major transforma-

tions occur through what Scrase & Smith (2009, p. 708) describe as

an ‘‘unpredictable and often disruptive evolutionary social and

technological change”, driven by economic priorities and prof-

itability, and where the prime selection mechanism is constituted

by the market (Hausknost & Hass, 2019). Indeed, for an innovation

to survive the pilot stage and be scaled up, the primary condition is

its economic viability not its potential future societal beneﬁts. In

other terms, the dominant dynamics of socio-technical progress

is one that is driven by economic success and associated higher

proﬁts (Hausknost & Hass, 2019; Schneider et al., 2020). In theory,

there is nothing wrong with this, except that the process is not ﬁt

for purposive societal transformation. Beyond the fact that technol-

ogy may create undesirable lock-ins (Cowan & Gunby 1996;

Magrini et al., 2016), more fundamentally, the inherent dynamics

of proﬁtability leads to a random process reﬂecting its evolutionary

selective mechanism where multiple innovations will ‘‘intersect,

overlap and conﬂict in unpredictable ways” (Scoones et al., 2015,

p. 33). The pattern of change that typically drives innovation pro-

cesses is therefore ‘‘random” (Geels et al., 2015, p. 7) and lacks

the purposive, normative and goal-oriented component that would

be necessary for a sustainable transformation to happen. In that

sense, although Herrero et al. (2020) are correct pointing at the

large number of existing or near-ready innovations that could con-

tribute to a ‘sustainable’ transformation of the food system, they

forget that the 75 ‘‘technologies with transformation potential”

that they identify (listed in their Fig. 1 p. 268) result from a

cheery-picking process which aims exactly at counterbalancing

the random nature of innovation. In essence, through their careful

selective process, what Hererro and his colleagues did was to add

the normative element that is currently missing from the market.

Symbolistically, they replace the ‘invisible hand’ by a visible one

in an attempt to steer innovations towards sustainability. But the

market, left alone, is blind to sustainability. Competing with, and

overcrowding those 75 sustainability-friendly innovations, 3 times

more, or maybe 10 times more innovations will be put on the mar-

ket and will, sometimes indirectly and sometimes conspicuously,

offset the sustainable effects of those 75 ‘positive’ innovations -

see Fig. 2.

6. Politics of evidence (and evidence of politics) in food systems

The last section of this analysis draws on some of the arguments

deployed in the ‘‘politics of evidence” literature (Smith, 2013;

Cairney, 2015). It will show how science and knowledge are being

used (or mis-used) by different actors –including the Big Food

industry, but also policy-makers or even scientists– and how this

politic of evidence and the related evidence-based policy discourse

(Hammersley, 2005; Broadbent, 2012) can contribute to slowing

down the process of societal transformation.

6.1. Evidence-based policy and the failure of science

‘‘The importance of evidence-based policymaking should not

obscure the fact that evidence alone is never sufﬁcient to make pol-

icy choices, which almost always involve some trade-off between

competing interests and values”(OECD, 2021, p.88)

Scientists generally hold the view that the use of evidence in

policy-making is inherently a ‘good thing’ (the so-called

evidence-based policy discourse) (Broadbent, 2012) and that the

function of generating neutral and impartial evidence is the ulti-

mate role of scientists (Smith, 2013; Hammersley, 2013). This

vision fails to recognize, however, that more often than not, evi-

dence (or lack of it) is explicitly used as a tool for the promotion

of speciﬁc interests -especially when the issue at stake may be

highly contested (Weiss, 1989; Parkhurst, 2017) as it is the case

for many aspects of the Great Transformation. We see two ways

in which sciences are misused in this process: either as part of

what we call (i) the politicisation of science; or as part of (ii) the

depoliticisation of societal debates.

6.1.1. Politicisation of science

Politicisation of science refers to the process by which speciﬁc

pieces of evidence are cherry-picked –or on the contrary ignored

or hidden– as a way to advance particular agendas, ideologies or

ideas (Wise, 2006; Parkhurst, 2017). To some extent this starts

with unethical or ‘weak’ science, when scientists alter their own

results to conﬁrm their own hypotheses, to ﬁnd a positive impact,

or (more often than we think) to ‘align’ their results with the cur-

rent mainstream paradigm (Fanelli, 2009). But this process

becomes really ‘political’ when it refers to the mis-use of science

by other actors (pharmaceutical companies, policy-makers, gov-

ernments or administrations

) which deliberately distort evidence

Some of the most infamous examples include the G.W. Bush administration who

has been shown to make selective uses of evidence to justify the 2003 war in Irak

(Pillar, 2006;Van der Heide, 2013).

C. Béné World Development 154 (2022) 105881

as an attempt to misinform or inﬂuence their clients, constituency,

or patients. One well-established example is that of the tobacco

industry which managed to deter or delay live-saving laws and pub-

lic health policies for more than 30 years through the systematic

manipulations of evidence (Bero, 2005; Stuckler & Nestle, 2012).

There is unfortunately a disturbing parallel between the 1960–

1990s behaviour of the tobacco industry, and the current beha-

viour of Big Food actors (Brownell & Warner, 2009). Considerable

evidence has now been accumulated that shows how food and

beverage companies for instance adopt unethical tactics to chal-

lenge public health responses such as taxation and regulation

(see, e.g., Ludwig & Nestle, 2008; Stuckler et al., 2011). Every sys-

tematic review available in the literature converges toward the

same conclusion, namely the frequent manipulation of evidence

by the industry and the researchers who work for them.

Mandrioli et al. (2016), for instance, found that industry-

sponsored reviews assessing the effects of sugar-sweetened bever-

ages are all statistically more likely to have results favourable to

the industry compared with non-industry sponsored reviews. Sim-

ilar results were found by other systematic reviews, including Bes-

Rastrollo et al. (2013); Massougbodji et al. (2014) and Lesser et al.

(2007)

. More concerning, Mandrioli et al. (2016) also found that

almost half of the papers they reviewed had authors who failed to

disclose relevant conﬂicts of interest with the food industry

.In

sum, the politicisation of science and its instrumentalization by

the transnational agri-food corporations is a reality that needs to

be debunked and fought against as it contributes to slow down the

changes in laws, regulations and policies that are necessary to sup-

port the transformation of the sector toward healthier and more sus-

tainable foods.

6.1.2. The depoliticisation of societal debate

The depoliticisation of societal debate refers to the process by

which the political dimension of a particular issue (for instance

winners and losers created by a public or private investment) is

eliminated by the careful reframing of the problem (in the sense

of Van Hulst & Yanow, 2016) or the selective choice of particular

pieces of evidence over others. An illustrative example (reported

in Schmidt et al., 2020) would be when the Coca Cola company jus-

tiﬁed the launch of a new bottling plant in Colombia in 2016 by

highlighting that the new plant was to ‘‘decrease the carbon foot-

print and encourage the use of sustainable packaging”, but

neglected to mention that the same new plant was also going to

consume 68% of the water resources of the entire municipality

(Schmidt et al., 2020). By reframing the problem around carbon

footprint but ‘forgetting’ the water usage, Coca Cola eliminated

the political debate about the actual impact of the plant on the

local community.

Although this particular example involves some of the main

actors of the Big Food, the issue of depoliticisation of the agenda

is not exclusive to the private sector, and researchers and policy-

makers themselves very often are involved (Liverani et al., 2013;

Parkhurst, 2017). Academics and researchers, for instance, by

insisting about the centrality of the evidence-based policy (EBP)

approach as the primary path by which ‘good’ policy can be formu-

lated, often encourage, or at least indirectly contribute to, this

depoliticisation of societal debates in which decision-makers

decide to prioritize issues for which a large or more coherent body

of evidence is already available (e.g. the nutritional beneﬁts of bio-

fortiﬁcation on populations with limited access to diverse diets,

Bouis & Saltzman (2017), and move away from more complex

social and/or structural interventions for which it is not always

easy to identify direct causal mechanisms or gather evidence of

immediate effect (e.g. effect of land redistribution reforms on food

security e.g. Valente, 2009). Relying on a systematic review of pol-

icy in public health, Liverani et al. (2013) remark:.

‘‘unreﬂective acceptance of over-simpliﬁed concepts of ‘evidence

based policy’ is not conducive to good governance practices (....),

[P]olitical pressures may encourage a selective use of evidence as

a rhetorical device to support predetermined policy choices or ide-

ological positions, or may delay decision-making on contentious

issues while less contentious topics with clearer, uncontested evi-

dence bases are followed”(Liverani et al., 2013, p.6).

In situations where ‘things are complicated’, with many differ-

ent groups of stakeholders involved and where trade-offs between

outcomes are likely to occur as it is the case in food systems (Béné

et al. 2019), the promotion of particular evidence can therefore

depoliticize the policymaking process and eventually fail to pro-

vide the appropriate frame for analysis. A recent example of this

is found in Vietnam where the policy focus on food safety pro-

moted by experts (e.g., World Bank, 2017; Nguyen-Viet et al.,

2017) has been instrumentalized by the central government to

push for the modernization and supermarketization of the Viet-

namese food system, at the detriment of other important issues

such as the rapid raise of obesity (UNICEF et al., 2020; Beal et al.,

2020). In a sense, this case illustrates perfectly the ‘‘selective use

of evidence as a rhetorical device to support predetermined policy

choices” referred to by Liverani et al. (2013) above. More nuanced

analyses of the Vietnamese case reveal, however, that this super-

marketization agenda and the underlying instrumentalization of

Fig. 2. Too many ‘innovations’ put on the market are not driven by sustainability principles and go against what is need for a Great Transformation to take place.

Bes-Rastrollo et al. (2013) found for instance that about 80% of studies without

any reported conﬂict of interest conclude that sugar-sweetened beverages could be a

potential risk factor for weight gain, while by contrast, 80% among reviews disclosing

a ﬁnancial conﬂict of interest with the food industry, conclude that the scientiﬁc

evidence is insufﬁcient.

This systematic bias is not exclusive to the Big Food industry. It is also observed in

pharmaceutical industry (Bekelman et al. 2003;Lundh et al., 2012) and more

systematically across industrial sectors (Pielke, 2002;Oreskes and Conway, 2011;

Fabbri et al., 2018).

C. Béné World Development 154 (2022) 105881

the food safety crisis not only lead to a ‘‘tunnel vision” (Béné et al.,

2021, p.18) amongst the policy-makers who are then unable to

identify and engage in longer-term issues such as the raise of obe-

sity amongst urban population, but also completely obliterates

other politically thorny issues such as the question of the status

of informal street vendors (Kawarazuka et al., 2018) who operate

in country’s major cities and contribute to the food security and

nutrition of a large part of the urban population –in particular

the poor (Wertheim-Heck et al. 2015; Béné et al., 2021).

Other examples of this depoliticisation of the decision-making

process abound in the literature including the impacts of the Green

Revolution which for many years has been essentially framed

around agronomic and economic aspects (allowing to highlight

the positive effects on agricultural productivity, food prices, or

even returns to investment), while other more equity-related

issues (such as the widening of disparities between regions as

the poorest areas relying on rain-fed agriculture were being left

behind, Pingali, 2012; Patel, 2013) were excluded from the

discussions.

Currently, the way the digitalization of the food system is

framed in the literature could be seen as another example. While

a lot of the literature focusses on what is called the ‘‘digital divi-

dends”, documenting in particular the role of big data, artiﬁcial

intelligence, use of blockchain etc., in farm production systems,

value chains and food systems (see, e.g., Deichmann et al., 2016;

Sparapani, 2017), equity and power issues around who access

and beneﬁt from those technological innovations (the ‘‘digital

divide”) and whether this digital revolution increases or decreases

inequality among men vs. women, small-holders vs. larger ﬁrms,

OECD countries vs. Global South, is more rarely debated

. In that

case again, the framing of the discussion around the what,as

opposed to the who- allows to evacuate the political economy ele-

ments of the debate.

In sum, the depoliticisation of the decision-making process as

we see it already at work in the food system –to which science,

by reframing societal complex problems into simple technical

issues, participates– contributes to devalue or to ignore the inher-

ent political nature of the transformation of the system and its

unavoidable trade-offs.

7. For the Great Transformation to happen...

In the previous sections of this paper, we identiﬁed several

barriers-to-change, which we posit are contributing to lock the

food system in its current unsustainable trajectory. In this last sec-

tion, we will revisit those with the intention to identify how to

reconﬁgure the system and steer it in the direction of the Great

Transformation.

7.1. First, destabilizing the status quo and dis-empowering the Big

Food

‘‘It is important that well-meaning critics understand that food

companies are not focused on making people fat; they are focused

on making money”. (Mike Huckabee -former US Arkansas Gover-

nor, quoted in Wilde, 2009, p.159)

In light of Mr. Huckabee’s statement, we argue that, in order to

happen, a normative, purposive transformation would imply a

foundational shift in the current governance of food systems with

the ambition of dis-empowering the incumbent Big Food actors

and destabilizing the status quo.

Food systems as they operate are not sustainable and the

transnational agri-food corporations that control them will not

be able to become the agents of change that are required to redi-

rect the systems toward more sustainable outcomes. Currently,

the incentive structures of those agri-food corporations are largely

determined by global ﬁnancial markets’ priorities (Clapp, 2014;

IPES 2017), including the demand for continuous proﬁts and high

returns on investment (Wiist, 2011; Clapp, 2017). Those priorities

are simply and clearly not compatible with the objectives of a sus-

tainable food system. As Stuckler & Nestle sagaciously pointed out

almost 10 years ago, ‘‘food systems are not driven to deliver

optimal human diets but to maximize proﬁts (2012, p.1). There is

therefore a fundamental and intrinsic contradiction between the

vision of a sustainable, healthy and just world that those calling

for the Great Transformation have in mind, and the Big Food’s core

business and structure and their disproportional concentration of

market share, wealth and power (IPES 2017; Schneider et al.,

2020).

In those conditions, the claims that transnational agri-food cor-

porations can ‘‘become a positive force in sustainability transi-

tions” (Folke et al., 2019, p.3) and drive the re-directing of the

system toward sustainability are difﬁcult to justiﬁed based on evi-

dence. What a Great Transformation would imply, instead, is a dis-

continuation of the Big Food oligopolistic hegemony on the food

system, in order to reintroduce a true competitiveness in the sys-

tem and permit smaller actors and new comers to engage, destabi-

lizing the current status quo through disruptive innovations, and

participate to the changes that are required.

7.2. Second, aligning innovation with sustainability

Complementing the destabilization of the current status quo

and the dis-empowerment of the Big Food, we need also to remem-

ber that innovation left on its own will not solve the problem. A

prescriptive restructuration of the innovation process is also

required. The second critical element in creating the conditions

for a Great Transformation to happen should therefore be the

establishment of not just an enabling but a normative environment,

guiding the technological innovation process. We saw in section

5.2 that under ‘normal’ conditions, the factor that drives technolog-

ical innovations and conditions their success (or failure) is their

economic proﬁtability, and that, as a consequence, the pattern of

change emerging from this selection processes is ‘‘random”, lead-

ing to both desirable but also undesirable innovations. Said differ-

ently, at the present time, the process lacks the purposive, goal-

oriented dimension that is necessary to ensure that innovations

arriving on the food market are not just economically viable but

also aligned with the societal goal of sustainability (Hausknost &

Hass, 2019; Schneider et al., 2020). What is needed therefore is

the establishment of a governance system through which a clear

directionality is enforced so that innovations stop being random

and become sustainability-oriented. The same ways that Herrero

and his co-authors’ visible hands had picked up speciﬁc innova-

tions which, based on their expertise, were deemed desirable, this

normative process will need to ensure that innovations that are

desirable are identiﬁed and supported, while those that are not

aligned with sustainability objectives (such as the one displayed

on Fig. 2) are deterred.

The few exceptions to this are studies based on high income countries analyses –

see e.g. Bowen and Morris, (2019); or the special issue edited by Klerkx et al. (2019).

C. Béné World Development 154 (2022) 105881

The transformation will have, therefore, to be signiﬁcant and

bold. It will have to avoid the trap of the self-regulation dis-

course

16,17

, and resist the false promises of the corporate responsi-

bility and other social-license-to-operate’s rhetorics

. Those

governance models, which have been tried for more than 30 years,

are part of the reasons why our food systems are, today, unsustain-

able. What we are discussing here is therefore not just transforming

food systems themselves, but transforming the governance of food sys-

tems and in particular altering the mechanisms driving the innova-

tion process. As remarked earlier, left in the invisible hands of the

market, innovations are not capable of self-alignment with sustain-

ability. We need to create that alignment. For that, the system needs

is to be put on its head. Instead of having innovations driving societal

changes and public policies playing the role of enabling environ-

ment, we need public policies proactively driving the process and

innovations following.

In this new governance system, small innovators and entrepre-

neurs (organic or biofarmers, inventive processors or transporters

reducing the carbon footprint of their activities, owners or man-

agers of restaurants proposing healthy or environmentally friendly

menus, municipalities prioritizing recycling, etc.), all those actors

who are currently dwarfed by Big Food, would be the ones sup-

ported by the new system so that, within 10 years, the only inno-

vations that would come through would be those systematically

aligned with sustainability norms.

7.3. Third, directionality and accountability of governments’ decisions

The third element in this governance transformation is about

international accountability. We claim that the directionality

needed for an effective food system Great Transformation will have

to be generated through political will and strong accountability at

the international level (Fanzo et al., 2021). The current two-face of

many governments, who, on one hand, preach the need for an

urgent transition to more sustainable and healthier food systems,

while, with the other hand, continuing to offer signiﬁcant subsidies

and ﬁnancial support to national and/or trans-national corpora-

tions which objectives are not aligned with the changes required

for the Great Transformation (see section 4.2 in the case of the

red meat industry), needs to be exposed.

Mechanisms of soft accountability already exist. The Hunger

and Nutrition Commitment Index (HANCI) is one example in the

speciﬁc domain of food security and nutrition. The HANCI mea-

sures countries’ political commitment to tackling hunger and

undernutrition, and document where governments fail in address-

ing those issues, thus providing greater transparency and some

level of public accountability (te Lintelo et al., 2014). But the

majority of the commitments and pledges made by those govern-

ments are voluntary. Other monitoring and tracking initiatives

exist, such as the Countdown for Maternal, Newborn and Child

Health (Boerma et al., 2018), the Lancet Countdown for Climate

Change and Health (Watts et al., 2019), or the Global Nutrition

Report’s annual tracking of World Health Assembly and SDG nutri-

tion targets (GNR, 2020). While those initiatives are critical instru-

ments to monitor progress toward speciﬁc goals, the magnitude of

the changes required for a Great Transformation and the multi-

sectoral nature of that transformations is beyond the scope of

those individual initiatives.

The objective here would be to ensure that governments don’t

shy away from their responsibilities and duties not only vis-a-vis

their own citizen but also the citizen of other countries. We could

therefore imagine a system where governments would be held

accountable (by other governments or by civil society organiza-

tions) for continuing to support transnational food corporations’

investments in unsustainable activities.

Our view is that only an Intergovernmental organization with

enough ‘‘teeth” (including the power to enforce participants’

adherence to international norms on food system sustainability

(to be established –see Fanzo et al., 2021) and the abilities to

resolve potential emerging international disputes) would offer

the foundations necessary to compel individual governments to

align their national policies with a global food system sustainabil-

ity goal and create the international accountability mechanism

necessary for the success of such endeavour –see also Béné et al.

2020. The work of this intergovernmental organization would be

contributing, at the international level, to the governance transfor-

mation that was discussed at national level in section 7.2.

7.4. Science’s new agenda

‘‘(...)simply using evidence does not necessarily make a decision

democratically legitimate.”(Parkhurst 2017, p.30)

Evidence are critical for knowledge generation, and the case of

food systems (for which our understanding of what sustainability

looks like, or even more trivially how many people operate infor-

mally in LMICs’, appears still very patchy) certainly calls for an

upsurge of data collection. There is therefore a risk that, once again,

scientists conﬁne themselves into a comfortable role of ‘‘knowl-

edge brokers” (as in Folke et al., 2019), focussing on generating

‘‘more evidence”, and in doing so walk away from engaging into

the politics and contested nature of food system transformations.

As reﬂected in Parkhurst’s quote above, for too long scientists have

failed to recognize that, while claiming to contribute to –or to try

to inﬂuence- policymaking process, they also need to accept and

embrace the political implications of their own research

(Parkhurst, 2017; OECD, 2021).

What is needed is not just more data or more evidence, but dif-

ferent types of data and evidence, in particular at the interface

between science, society and policy in relation to food systems

(Kennedy & Liljeblad, 2016; Caron et al., 2018; Webb et al., 2020;

Fazey et al. 2020), to better understand how the actors of those dif-

ferent spheres interact with each other and how those interactions

shape the environmental, economic, social, health, and cultural

outcomes of food systems, and contribute (or not) to align the sys-

tem toward a long-term sustainability (Patterson et al. 2017; Béné

et al., 2019; Fanzo, 2021). While going beyond simple technologi-

cal debates, we need to identify the wider governance models

and multiple pathways leading toward this Great Transformation,

dig deeper and more extensively into the potential barriers to

transformation and how country and more local speciﬁc dynamics

and contexts alter the dynamics around those different barriers.

While some analyses are already available (Murphy et al., 2012;

Clapp, 2017), we need more of this type of analysis to continue

Industry self-regulation refers to the ‘‘process whereby an industry-level

organization sets rules and standards relating to the conduct of ﬁrms in the industry’’

(Sharma et al. 2010, p.242). Self-regulation is voluntary and is typically framed as a

socially responsible industry practice that has consumer’s welfare as its central

feature. The narrative around the justiﬁcation for self-regulation is that a self-

regulatory system conserves government resources and is less adversarial, more

ﬂexible, and timelier than government regulation (USFTC, 2008).

The multiple analyses and systematic reviews that have been conducted all

converge toward the same conclusion, namely that the agri-food industry has not

been successful at implementing an effective self-regulation approach –see Lipschutz,

2000;Brownell and Warner, 2009;Koplan and Brownell, 2010;Sharma et al., 2010;

Stuckler and Nestle 2012;Ronit and Jensen, 2014;Kelly et al., 2019, amongst others.

Social License to operate, popularized in corporate usage over the last 20 years,

refers to the level of support and approval a company receives from its ‘social license

holders’ (employees, trade unions, communities, government) as a way to measure

the legitimacy of its activities and in theory contribute to encourage ‘‘good”

responsible corporate behavior (Gehman et al., 2017). The theoretical and practical

utility of the concept remains contested however and analyses shows that it is often

used opportunistically to advance individual agendas (van Putten et al., 2018).

C. Béné World Development 154 (2022) 105881

debunking the unsustainable behaviours of certain actors (Money

& ETC group, 2015; Howard, 2016), document governments and

private sector’s duplicitous discourses and policy incoherence

(Sharma et al., 2010; IPES, 2015) as those continue to perpetuate

the current status quo, and be more systematic and open at recog-

nizing and exposing the political economy implications of our own

research, including where and when trade-offs occur and who are

the winners and the losers (IPES & ETC group, 2021). We can’t hide

behind an alleged scientiﬁc neutrality any longer (Fazey et al.,

2020), as when it comes to food systems transformation, hard

choices will have to be made.

8. Conclusion

In this paper, we discussed the conditions under which the

Great Transformation called upon by many, can happen. Drawing

on analyses derived from different facets of political economy,

we argued that unless the interests, values and eventually beha-

viours of a large number of different actors are all re-aligned, the

Great Transformation will not happen. We showed how the eco-

nomic power concentrated in the hands of the main incumbents

of the system, the Big Food, has reached an unprecedented level

and how it plays a critical role in the lock-in of the system in its

current, unsustainable, trajectory. Beyond economic/ﬁnancial

power, however, other processes are contributing to this lock-in,

including ideology, policy incoherence, expressions of societal

aspirations, and culturally-embedded individual preferences,

which all together prevent the system from aligning toward a more

sustainable trajectory. While innovation is currently presented as

the ‘game-changer’, we showed how the current proﬁt-driven nat-

ure of its evolutionary selection also means that the aggregate out-

come of innovation, at present, is a random, adirectional process

incapable of steering food systems towards sustainability. We

argued that unless those different processes are tackled all

together in a resolutely normative, global, and prescriptive manner

at both national and international levels the great Transformation

will not happen. Based on this analysis, we identiﬁed a series of

transformative changes that would be necessary at the governance

level to unlock the system and steer it toward a sustainable trans-

formation. While the tone of this paper is relatively stern, it reﬂects

the severity of the situation. We believe however that the Great

Transformation can happen. It is a matter of political will.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Christophe Béné: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investiga-

tion, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Funding

acquisition.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing ﬁnan-

cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared

to inﬂuence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Programme ’Fake news or

weak science? Implications for sustainable development

transitions in the agri-food, environmental and health areas’

supported by the Montpellier Advanced Knowledge Institute on

Transitions (MAK’IT). An earlier version of this research beneﬁtted

from insightful comments from the 2020-21 MAK’IT cohort

members.

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Operationalizing Food System Governance: The Case of Fort Portal Food Change Lab

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2023

Transforming the current food system into one which delivers healthy, sustainable diets will require some form of governance. Due to the complex nature of the food system, multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs), which bring together actors from multiple sectors into a shared space for joint decision making, have been proposed as one potential governance structure. Using the Food Change Lab, a multi-stakeholder platform led by a local civil society organization in Fort Portal, Uganda, as a case study, this paper uses an explicit conceptual framework for food system governance to understand how such an MSP can support improved food system outcomes. Local-level, civil-society-led MSPs have a limited ability to support a system-based problem framing, due to a tension between a holistic view of the system and identifying concrete entry points for action. They can support boundary spanning by creating horizontal linkages but are less effective in creating vertical linkages due to their locally embedded nature. Because such MSPs are not dependent on formal policy processes, they can be very adaptable and flexible in prioritizing issues and focus areas. The greatest influence of such MSPs in food governance is in supporting inclusiveness, especially of marginalized voices. While such MSPs are unlikely to be able to achieve food system transformation alone, they do play a key role in engaging with marginalized groups, supporting inclusion of local issues and promoting alternative food system visions.

Incumbents’ Capabilities for Sustainability-Oriented Innovation in the Norwegian Food Sector—an Integrated Framework

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2022

Unlabelled: The urgency of sustainability transition requires large incumbents in the food industry to implement sustainability-oriented innovation (SOI). However, the high concentration of the food sector and the complexity of the sustainability concept make its understanding and overall transition challenging and slow. Incumbents would need to drive the transition by redesigning business models and practices and acquiring new competencies to integrate sustainability into their innovation strategy. This paper has a twofold aim: (I) analyzing the evolution of sustainability understanding over time and (II) evaluating the extent of dynamic capabilities of food incumbents to foster SOI. We developed an integrated theoretical framework combining the theory of dynamic capabilities with aspects of SOI and applied it to the case of the Norwegian food industry. We interviewed eight food incumbents and one food industry association, and we reviewed their annual and sustainability reports from 2016 till 2020. Key findings show a high strategic activity in SOI, as well as a notable and industry-wide ambiguity about what sustainability means in the food sector. Most companies reveal both an adaptive and expanding behavior implementing conscious sustainability-integrated product and process innovations. Most innovations are incremental without a radical modification of business models. Some exceptions have been detected resembling transformative changes. Clear initiatives of moving away from a linear supply chain to a more systematic approach are currently happening through food system collaborations. Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s43615-022-00234-1.

Protein pluralism and food systems transition: A review of sustainable protein meta-narratives

Article

Jan 2023
WORLD DEV

There is a very quickly growing literature regarding the appropriate role of protein foods in sustainable food systems transition. From this literature there has emerged several points of contention and debate. There is, for instance, contestation over the appropriate balance of plant- and animal- sourced protein foods in feeding the world’s growing population; competing interpretations of the contributions made by plant and animal protein foods to healthy diets and the alleviation of malnutrition; disputes over the welfare of animals and human workers in protein production, as well as over the ethics of genetic manipulation in the production of novel protein food products; environmental debates about the relationships between protein food production methods and climate change and biodiversity decline; and finally (though not exhaustively), disagreements about how various populations, economic sectors, and cultural practices could be impacted by disruptive alternative protein food technologies or new protein-oriented policies introduced in the name of fomenting a sustainable agri-food transition. Protein foods are thus deeply implicated in a range of debates about sustainable agri-food systems. This article provides a review of the literature on the future of sustainable protein across five core dimensions of sustainable food systems: i) food security; ii) nutrition and health; iii) ethics and welfare; iv) climate change and biodiversity; and v) social, economic, and cultural prosperity. Using a similar method of interpretive narrative analysis as that developed by Béné et al. (2019) in World Development, we identify and define three main “meta-narrative coalitions” on protein sustainability and examine their respective proposed solutions along these five dimensions. We label and define the three meta-narrative coalitions as i) “Modernizing Protein” (an approach which centers technological innovation as the primary mechanism for achieving sustainability in the global food system); ii) “Reconstituting Protein” (which prioritizes the reduction of animal protein consumption and the introduction of novel protein food products in order to achieve sustainable food system transition); and iii) “Regenerating Protein” (which seeks to restore human-nature relationships within protein production and consumption practices as a means of achieving sustainable development within the global agri-food sector). In addition to defining these meta-narrative coalitions and highlighting their core differences, internal disputes, and areas of common ground, we note how all three narrative coalitions are actively seeking to reshape food systems in material ways. In conclusion, we argue that the pluralist character of contemporary efforts in sustainable protein transition – wherein the world appears to be simultaneously moving in different directions at once – holds resilience potential, yet it also faces challenges which could hinder sustainable transformation. Our review contributes to ongoing debates in the literature by highlighting the need for proponents of different sustainable protein meta-narratives to work towards shared objectives, and constructively engage criticisms from opposing perspectives.

Transformations towards Sustainable Food Systems: Pathways, Governance, and Actors in a Swedish and European Union Context

Thesis

Full-text available

Feb 2023

Karin Eliasson

Food systems are central to global sustainability, while being complex systems where places and people are intertwined over large distances and at different scales. Transformations towards sustainable food systems have been called for in both research and policy, and Sweden and the European Union have declared high ambitions to act as global leaders in these transformations. While food production in Sweden and the European Union is often portrayed as largely sustainable in a global context, the region is highly dependent on food imports, with relatively large environmental footprints globally. This thesis aims to explore transformative pathways towards sustainability, with a particular focus on sustainable food systems, in a Swedish and European Union context. The thesis specifically studies the following research questions: (1) What constitutes transformations towards sustainability, and in particular sustainable food systems, from the perspectives of Swedish stakeholders, including food system practitioners, and European Union policy frameworks? (2) What roles, responsibilities, and agency do Swedish stakeholders, including food system practitioners and European Union policy frameworks, attribute to different actors? (3) How can interconnections and accountability in global food systems be understood and governed in light of societal transformations towards sustainability? (4) What are the implications for transformative pathways towards sustainability? The thesis builds on four papers that use focus group methodology (PI and PII), involving Swedish stakeholders, including food-system practitioners, analyses of European Green Deal policies (PII and PIII), and quantitative investigation of phosphorus fertiliser use in Brazilian soybean production and related biodiversity impacts (PIV). Four overarching conclusions are drawn from the findings: (I) Shared goals and consensus are emphasised as essential, while a diversity of transformative pathways and understandings of challenges and priorities needs to be recognised, with attention being paid to how specific choices might include and exclude pathways and actors. (II) Emerging shifts in how food is valued open up opportunities for transformative change in which the ‘true’ cost of food is acknowledged, alongside a recognition of non-economic values of food, which presupposes alignment at the practical, political, and personal levels. (III) The identified pathways comprise public accountability regimes, incentives for more sustainable consumption, regulations to reduce resource use and impacts of food production. (IV) The attribution of accountability to trading operators in the accountability regime proposed by the European Union highlights an extended focus from food production and consumption towards regulating flows and intermediate actors in food systems.

Concentration and crises: exploring the deep roots of vulnerability in the global industrial food system

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2022
J PEASANT STUD

Jennifer Clapp

The world has experienced three global food crises in the past 50 years. While unique triggers sparked each of these crises, they all exposed extreme concentration within the global industrial food system at multiple scales – at the field, country, and global market levels. This multi-level concentration heightens vulnerability to worldwide food crises that have profound consequences for the world’s most marginalized populations. With a focus on staple grains production and trade, this contribution traces the origins of the high degrees of multi-level concentration in the industrial food system and draws insights for debates on the current food systems transformation agenda.

Framing Political Issues in Food System Transformative Changes

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2022

The paper addresses political issues related to policy interventions for food system sustainability. It presents the results of a literature review, which explores how the concept of power has been used so far by scholars of food system dynamics. Articles numbering 116 were subjected to an in-depth qualitative analysis, which allowed the identification of three main strands of the literature with respect to food and power issues: (1) marketing and industrial organisation literature, dealing with the economic power exercised by economic actors in contexts of noncompetitive market structures; (2) articles addressing the power issue from a political economy perspective and by using an interdisciplinary approach; (3) heterogenous studies. The results of the review witness a growing interest for the analysis of food systems, political issues, and the need of a wider use of analytical tools and concepts offered by social sciences for the study of power in sustainability policy design.

Transhumance Farmers' Perceptions of Climate Change in the Mediterranean Region, Turkey

Conference Paper

Full-text available

Sep 2022

The perception of climate change (i), observations on climate change (ii) and climate change adaptation strategies (iii) of 37 transhumance farmers were questioned. The study was carried out in Silifke, Aydıncık, Erdemli district of Mersin province in the Mediterranean Region, Turkey. The data analysis was done both using qualitative and quantitative methods. Likerttype scale was used to measure perception on climate changes and adaptation strategies. Majority of farmers have heard of climate change (71%). Almost all farmers observed both the frequency and severity of extreme climatic events such as drought (58%), heat and unreliable rainfall (86%), reflecting actual trends in rainfall and temperature in the study area and farmers focused mainly on selling livestock (100%) (mostly to cope with degraded natural grassland/feed deficiency) as an adaptive strategy. There is a massive gap on the adaptative strategies action plan in the regional administration. In light of the aforementioned findings and shortfalls, it is suggested that early warning policy systems be developed with the goal of making transhumance farmers aware of future climate variability and potential shocks so that they can take proactive steps to employ various approaches that best suit different agro-climatic conditions.

Simple solutions for complex problems? What is missing in agriculture for nutrition interventions

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2022

Within the nutritionism paradigm, in this article we critically review the marketization and medicalization logics which aim to address the pressing issue of malnutrition in low-and middle-income countries. Drawing from political economy and food system transformation discourses, we are using the popular intervention types of nutrition-sensitive value chains (marketization logic) and biofortification exemplified through orange-fleshed sweet potato (medicalization logic) to assess their outcomes and underlying logics. We demonstrate that there is insufficient evidence of the positive impact of these interventions on nutritional outcomes, and that their underlying theories of change and impact logics do not deal with the inherent complexity of nutritional challenges. We show that nutrition-sensitive value chain approaches are unable to leverage or enhance the functioning of value chains to improve nutritional outcomes, especially in light of the disproportionate power of some food companies. We further demonstrate that orange-fleshed sweet potato interventions and biofortification more broadly adopt a narrow approach to malnutrition , disregarding the interactions between food components and broader value chain and food system dynamics. We argue that both intervention types focus solely on increasing the intake of specific nutrients without incorporating their embeddedness in the wider food systems and the relevant political-economic and social relations that influence the production and consumption of food. We conclude that the systemic nature of malnutrition requires to be understood and addressed as part of the food system transformation challenge in order to move towards solving it. To do so, new evaluation frameworks along with new approaches to solutions are necessary that support multiple and diverse development pathways, which are able to acknowledge the social, political-economic, and environmental factors and drivers of malnutrition and poverty.

A methodological approach for estimating the costs and benefits of climate adaptation measures

Conference Paper

Sep 2022

This paper investigates on the effectiveness of climate adaptation measures in countering climate risk damage. Our paper provides a-depth costs and benefits assessment associated with the adoption of the climate adaptation measures in Italian farms. Concerns about global warming are currently attracting interest of global policy makers and the issue is central to the political and scientific debate. This paper use methodology that will be implemented in LIFE project "ADapation in Agriculture"- ADA which aims to help improve adaptation to climate change and promote sustainable and inclusive growth in the agricultural sector. In this context, we provide a methodology framework for costs and benefits assessment of adaptation measures to climate change and their economic and environmental effects at the farm-level in Italy to improve farmers ability to face current and future climate risks. We provide an exemplary estimation model based on entity of damage avoided - deriving by adverse climatic events with the climate adaptation measures adoption. The results provide a methodology to represent costs and benefits associated with the reduction of the climatic risk that countering the adaptation measure. The use methodology approach could be to support farmers in choosing to adoption of appropriate climate adaptation measures. This framework is a prerequisite for identifying the specific support interventions for adaptation measures, mainly deriving from rural development measures to which farmers will be able to access. Our challenge is to outline specific measures for the agricultural sector, to counteract impacts of climate change also at local level.

Food systems governance should be preceded by food systems diplomacy

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2022

The practice by which international actors consider and engage with negotiations that influence the food system — food systems diplomacy — has the potential to reframe the global food governance narrative to balance the health, social, environmental and economic domains of food systems.

The Politics Of Green Transformations

Chapter

Full-text available

Jan 2015

Viewpoint: Rigorous monitoring is necessary to guide food system transformation in the countdown to the 2030 global goals

Why the Great Food Transformation may not happen – A deep-dive into our food systems’ political economy, controversies and politics of evidence

Abstract