World Food Day: How has the challenge of protecting global food security changed since 1945?

Today is World Food Day, a moment created by the United Nations to commemorate the founding of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and bring everyone’s attention to hunger and food more broadly. Looking back across the decades since the founding of the FAO in 1945 — the first in the United Nations family of specialized agencies — we are confronted with different contradictions now than we were then. The share of humanity that faces acute hunger is far less, despite an extraordinary growth in human population. But the biggest cause of global food insecurity today is war, which humanity is nowhere near solving, and climate change, which even when our governments do not deny is a real problem, remains radically under-addressed. Despite repeated commitments to end the practice, food as a weapon of war is on the rise, evidenced in the continued appalling cruelty of Gaza’s occupation and the wars in Yemen and Sudan.

The contradictions spiral a bit tighter, too. Not only is hunger the result of deliberate human cruelty that is in our power to end, but the way we have provided much of the food that has reduced levels of hunger relies on technologies and market structures that are deepening present and future food insecurity. Hyper-production of a few high calorie crops — especially rice, maize, and wheat — has drained aquifers, depleted soils, and reduced biodiversity. They have weakened farming economically, too, by concentrating the capital accumulation in providing inputs, such as hybrid seeds and pesticides, and in processing and distribution. Across most food value chains, market concentration is high and distorting, increasing the precarity of farm labor and undermining farmers’ economic choices and ability to adapt to rapidly changing growing conditions. 

Having transitioned away from widespread food scarcity, we now face a new contradiction of scarcity and abundance, in which there are people who are malnourished due to lack of food living alongside people who are receiving enough food for the energy they need, but the food that they consume lacks the nutrients vital to physical well-being. This over-consumption of poor quality foods can lead to chronic illnesses that curtail life expectancy and impose huge costs on public health systems and in lost economic activity.

The FAO was born in the ashes of the Second World War. Food systems across the globe had been destroyed, hundreds of millions of people were displaced, and hunger was ever-present. Its birth coincided with the globalization of the Green Revolution, which made staple grains abundant and affordable in much of the world through technological innovation and the mechanization of agriculture. But that revolution took hold of our imaginations in ways that blinded us to its costs. And it locked in private interests that have grown so big and proved so resistant to change that they will pay for false science to discredit their critics, spend lavishly on political campaigns to protect their interests, and sue those who try to point out where the Green Revolution has gone wrong.

This year, IATP focused on two different parts of these contradictions. First, the need to reform how food systems are governed internationally, calling for a wide range of expertise and experience, and much more democratic and accountable mechanisms for decision-making. Second, we are soon publishing the result of a three-year reflection and analysis in the form of model treaty on agricultural trade for sustainable food systems, in response to a current agreement that is outdated and unequipped to govern food trade within our current realities.

We also looked at the FAO, and even more closely at the U.N. World Committee on Food Security (CFS). This is work on global governance: political and analytical work to shape the decisions and actions taken by our governments at the international level. We want to see our governments commit to normative frameworks and binding commitments that are founded in a deeply rooted moral conviction that human life everywhere is precious, equally entitled to dignity and respect.

Working with Brazil’s National Council for Food Security and Nutrition (CONSEA) and supported by the former coordinator of the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism at the CFS, Martin Walpold-Bosien, we organized three days of meetings in Brasilia with a group of participants from social movements, civil society organizations, government and intergovernmental agencies, and universities. We talked about the challenges facing countries that no country can solve on their own, the institutions we have created to address such challenges, and the ways those need to change and improve to be more accountable and more effective.

This week, IATP published the report of those discussions. We identified challenges and gaps, looked at U.N. reforms and how they fall short (though offer possibilities) and everyone emphasized the importance of thinking about the problems and solutions from an intersectoral approach — meaning, we need the agriculture department to talk to the health department, the investors to talk to the environmentalists, the economists to talk to the climate and nature scientists. We need the wisdom of many spheres of knowledge, and not just of different disciplines but also different ways of acquiring that knowledge, from the theoretical to the practiced, not leaving out the moral frameworks that define our humanity.

We are also just about to publish the Agreement on Agriculture Re-Imagined (AoA R), the result of a three-year project with the University of Bern’s Centre for Environment and Development and the International Institute for Sustainable Development. The AoA R Model Treaty is an effort to re-situate trade rules for agriculture within the context of existing inter-governmental agreements. The agreement aims to protect food security first and centrally as a human right, within commitments to limit harm to the planet.

A lot has changed since the end of the Second World War. While the commitment to end hunger remains a central challenge for the international system, we are now doing so in a world that is much more constrained by pollution and resource depletion, and understanding that hunger and malnutrition can persist, and even worsen, in the midst of abundant food. We will need to trade in the years ahead, as the geography of food production is re-written by climate change, geopolitical conflicts, and no doubt by evolving technologies, too. Let us govern that trade, and our food systems more broadly, with institutions fit for purpose, adaptive and ready to learn from farmers and social movements and moved by a willingness to cooperate for the public good.

There are so many people engaged in the vital work of protecting safe and nutritious food for all. Today is a time for all of us to stop for a moment and appreciate the work of the parents, farmers, workers, and institutions fighting for a brighter future for our food system at every level.