Agri-food Systems Transformation: New, Ambitious Framework Proposed to Monitor Progress

Sustainable, resilient, just, and equitable food systems that support access to healthy diets for all are possible. Realizing this potential is of utmost, urgent importance if the world is to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, the Paris Agreement, and other global goals. The UN Food Systems Summit in 2021 highlighted both the challenge and the opportunity for food systems transformation. However, at present there is no rigorous, coordinated effort to monitor all aspects of food systems and their interactions to set priorities and track progress. In a new paper, “Viewpoint: Rigorous monitoring is necessary to guide food system transformation in the countdown to the 2030 global goals,” Dr. Jessica Fanzo of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and colleagues call attention to this need for global food systems monitoring in order to inform decisions and support accountability for and good governance of the transformation process.

Under the leadership of Dr. Fanzo, Dr. Lawrence Haddad of GAIN, and Dr. Jose Rosero Moncayo of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, over 50 collaborators have come together to propose a rigorous monitoring framework for food systems populated with a clear set of relevant, high quality, interpretable, and useful indicators to support evidence-based policymaking and those who hold decision-makers to account. In this initial paper, the authors have developed an overarching framework that establishes five core thematic areas in need of monitoring: (1) diets, nutrition, and health; (2) environment and climate; and (3) livelihoods, poverty, and equity; (4) governance; and (5) resilience and sustainability. Under these areas, they have established indicator domains and will go through a rigorous process over the next year to select the indicators to be monitored within each and produce a baseline assessment of global food systems.

Learn more about Professor Fanzo’s work in Food Systems Monitoring.