Future-proof food systems

It is 3am in the slums of Nairobi. Many dwellers are already setting off for the industrial area where they earn their daily wages. During lunch, they eat at nearby roadside stalls which usually serve maize porridge or fried bread: both high in calories and fat, low in proteins and vitamins. But since 2019, more and more stalls have started to offer boiled pulses and vegetables. The person behind this idea is Khadija Churchill Mohamed, a former IT manager from Kenya who made it her mission to supply nutritious food to poor households in Nairobi.

Her company, Kwanza Tukule, meaning "first, let's eat" in Swahili, sources products directly from nearby farmers and sells them in bulk to street vendors at fair prices. Since the vendors often only have rudimentary equipment, Khadija and her team pre-cook the food using biogas that is generated from the waste. "In poor areas it’s mostly about survival," she says in a YouTube video. "And healthy food is crucial for that." Her brainchild serves a huge market in Kenya where over 84% of workers eat at roadside stalls.

Khadija received funding for her start-up from the SUN Business Network Kenya, a platform of the international Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement (see box). The Sun Business Network has been active since 2010 to promote collaboration between civil society, governments, the private sector and UN organisations to end global malnutrition. Former SUN coordinator Gerda Verburg repeatedly emphasised that food quality rather than calories was crucial to ensure food security.

Yet in 2021, almost 40% of the world’s population could not afford a healthy diet. This violates the right to adequate food which is enshrined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (see interview).

Today, about 1.6 billion people suffer from malnutrition, while the same number are overweight. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) estimates that 828 million people worldwide go to bed hungry. The situation has worsened in many places owing to global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the consequences of climate change. People in conflict-affected countries are the worst hit.

Severely impacted regions urgently need emergency assistance such as WFP’s food aid or cash transfers. At the same time, it is necessary to identify long-term solutions. What fundamental changes are necessary in production, distribution and consumption to make food systems more resilient to shocks such as war, the climate crisis and pandemics?

These are questions that Bernard Lehmann, chairperson of the UN High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE-FSN), has been grappling with. He is the first Swiss national to hold this post, having formerly been in various positions including professor of agricultural economics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. "For many people, finding cash or other means to buy food is the biggest priority," says Lehmann. Governments in affected countries also have an obligation to step up investment in comprehensive social protection programmes such as social security, unemployment insurance and health insurance as well as cash transfers or vouchers, which are increasingly used in low-income countries.

The latest report of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) which studies solutions to global hunger points to increasing evidence that such programmes improve nutrition, reduce chronic poverty and raise prosperity. In recent years, a growing number of UN human rights experts have called for an international social security fund to finance a minimum level of social security for all.

Apart from access to money or land, Lehmann believes there is also a need for greater investment in education and equal opportunities. Food systems in the countries of the Global South are generally the biggest employers of young people. "Young people and women must be given opportunities for skilling and reskilling as well as to set up their own businesses and participate in the local economy," says Lehmann. For this reason, it is important to professionalise the informal sector. "Micro enterprises can work wonders for food security."

One example is the start-up founded by Khadija in Kenya. In just four years, she built a team of 50 employees and now supplies 4,000 street vendors in Nairobi's working-class neighbourhoods with healthy food. She has received support from a fund that was set up in 2021 by the SDC and the Medicor Foundation with the aim of financing high-impact companies in East and Southern Africa.

Lehmann notes that Khadija offers something else that is central to food security, namely choice. She gives consumers the opportunity to decide what they want to eat.

Currently, the definition of food security is based on four pillars: availability, access, utilisation and stability. In a 2022 report, the HLPE proposed to expand this definition with two additional components: sustainability and right to act. "While sustainability aims at environmentally-friendly systems of production and trade, the right to act allows people to decide about their nutrition," explains Lehmann. This means they can determine what and how much they wish to consume. However, this requires a system that offers affordable variety.

In the urban regions of the Global South, the food system often comprises foods that are high in calories and sugar, says Jef Leroy. Leroy is a senior research fellow at IFPRI working on health and nutrition in low and middle-income countries. "Many vendors who want to supply balanced food to roadside stalls lack the necessary infrastructure," he says. They are unable to adequately refrigerate, store and transport dairy or meat products. They often do not have access to cooking facilities, for example to prepare pulses. "People with a family and a long commute to work often do not have the time to put healthy food on the table."

However, even those with enough money do not necessarily eat healthier. The market for ready-to-eat products is growing in the countries of the Global South, and many people in cities are adopting 'modern' eating habits which are also heavily promoted. Some food companies with considerable market clout also influence this development. Leroy suggests that government regulation is one potential solution to influence consumer behaviour. In Mexico, a tax on sugary drinks has been imposed since 2014, and in Chile sugary and fatty foods carry warning labels.

Apart from government regulations and transparent information, there is also a need for greater awareness about what constitutes healthy food, and how to prepare it. This is especially true for vegetables and grain varieties that were rarely grown before. "In some rural regions where we supported a project by a Dutch NGO, some households were not aware of how to cook eggplant," says Alessandra Roversi of the Food Systems Section at the SDC. A growing number of research programmes and projects consequently focus on consumer behaviour. This includes awareness building, making information available as well as identifying values and customs that may hinder healthy eating.

Roversi thinks that greater diversity is essential for crisis-proof food systems. "This includes trade, financing options, supply chains as well as what is put on the table and grown on farms," she says. In future, mainly traditional varieties of crops – such as millets and sorghum – which are well adapted to prevailing climatic conditions must be promoted. Such crops usually do not have an export market, "but are valuable for providing nutrition locally," says Roversi.

The cultivation of diverse food crops also helps to prevent droughts from wiping out entire harvests, and it makes supply chains less susceptible to shocks. Globally, an increasing number of projects aim to revive forgotten, traditional crop varieties and create a market for them.

Agroecology is one pathway to greater diversity. "Agroecology is a viable approach to transform the food system," states a report by HLPE that was commissioned by the Committee for Food Security (CFS) and published in 2019. The concept is gaining traction in academic and political discourse because it addresses several problems: the food crisis, loss of biodiversity and climate change. It focuses on the regenerative use of natural resources, requires few external inputs and combines traditional knowledge and insights with modern science. Regional markets and fair supply chains are also part of the concept.

The Transformative Partnership Platform (TPP) was founded in 2020 in response to the HLPE report. Its funders include the Global Partnership for Agricultural Research, CGIAR as well as the EU, France and Switzerland. The TPP seeks to promote the transition to agroecological agriculture.

But from a global perspective, concepts that seek to provide an alternative to industrial agriculture are still a niche. Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, holds the high levels of debt in individual countries responsible because this prevents them from investing in agricultural development. Some governments lack the political will to remove subsidies for environmentally harmful agricultural supplements.

In April, a report by Economist Impact in collaboration with the CGIAR called for a rethink of development funding. The report states that in the past, less than 7.5% of overseas development assistance (ODA) was spent on research and innovation to combat the causes of hunger and nutrition by 2021. Almost half was spent on food aid.

Lehman suggests that along with diversity in the food system, the diversity of solutions must also be acknowledged. "There is no magic formular for the food crisis," he says. Consequently, it becomes all the more important to invest in research and the implementation of different approaches to break out of the present crisis response mode. "Because we will pay a very high price if we do not act now."