Questioning our global food futures

‘Questioning our global food futures’ is a public consultation to find out, “What are the most important questions to ask—and to answer—for a future where everyone has enough, nutritious food to eat?”

We are inviting you to submit questions that are answerable by projects or research—answers that can be used by policy makers, business leaders, farmers, community advocates, scientists and others—to make our shared global food futures more equitable and sustainable.

At the end of the consultation (at the end of the Global Food Futures Year in June 2014), submitted questions will be placed in the public domain with no attribution to the individual author (to ensure people can be as candid as possible), and there will be an opportunity to vote on all questions online.

The top ten questions will be published on an online forum, and all will be invited to share information about projects, tools and research that could help answer them. These questions will also be used to frame a report on the  the Humanitarian Centre’s Global Food Futures Year.

Food for thought . . .

In the second half of the twentieth century, the “green revolution” brought scientific and technological breakthroughs into land management and agricultural production. However, this ‘revolution’ did not result in an end to hunger. There is now enough food produced to feed everyone in the world, but powerful social, economic and political forces influence how food is produced and who gets to consume it. Consequently, one in eight people is still suffering from chronic undernourishment, but diseases related to overnutrition—like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease—are even more pervasive.

Projections indicate that an additional 2 billion will be added to our global population by the middle of the century. This raises crucial questions about the implications of this increase in population coupled with other pressures on our ability to produce food, keep food prices stable and affordable for all, and provide adequate and appropriate nutrition.

The world faces a changing landscape. Changing climate and weather patterns are having a significant impact on the total output of our land. Compounded by ever increasing costs for industrial inputs, commodity markets are volatile and result in food insecurity for billions of people. Changing diets have a significant impact on our health as well as putting pressure on what we use our land to produce. Recent food scandals highlighted the difficulties of controlling ever more complex global markets for food, and there is growing evidence of the social and environmental consequences of managing long, and often opaque, supply chains.

Yet, policy makers are increasingly turning to food systems as potential sources for employment and as a resource that is essential to provide wider public good. Examples of such goods are the local availability of affordable food, biodiversity, quality soil, safe water and spaces for recreation and conservation.

The value of questioning and consensus

People all over the world—researchers, farmers, teachers, advertisers, politicians, women’s rights advocates, and many others—are asking questions about how we can ensure sustainable access to nutritious food for all, and most urgently, for the poorest. If we can agree on the questions that are most pressing to answer, we can more effectively focus our efforts on answering them by sharing resources, evidence and ideas—by telling one another about successes, failures, and innovations that are making a real difference.

This public consultation draws on several interesting processes that have also provided platforms for prioritising questions and sharing learning. For example, in 2010, the University of Cambridge and the UK Government’s Foresight Global Food and Farming Futures asked experts to make a list of “The top 100 questions of importance to the future of global agriculture” (read more here), and more recently the UK’s Global Food Security programme asked, ‘What are priority research questions for the UK food system?’ (find out here). This year Oxfam hosted an online debate about the future of agriculture with over three hundred participants from all over the world (and you can see that report here.) We hope “Questioning our Global Food Futures” provides another forum for us to keep these conversations going, and to make them even more inclusive.

This consultation is a part of the Humanitarian Centre’s Global Food Futures Year (October 2013-June 2014), and is being run in partnership with the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University.