By Jess Fanzo and Ty Beal
The world will need to increase its food production by more than 50% and reduce food loss and waste to meet the nutritional needs of the world’s population by 2050. In the context of the broad global trends of population growth, climate, and malnutrition including undernutrition and obesity, this is and will continue to be a massive feat. This transformation will require smarter technology and more sustainable and regenerative food production practices that make efficient use of natural resources, waste less, and provide access to healthier diets. The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed an additional level of pressure on food systems. It has highlighted the strong interconnections between food and health systems, exacerbated economic inequities, and revealed inequities in who has access to healthy foods and healthcare.
copyright: MIT
There is a lot being asked of food systems to transform. They must provide healthy diets. They must be environmentally sustainable. They must ensure sufficient livelihoods for those working in the food system. They must support societal traditions. They must be equitable. But how do we ensure that food systems are addressing these multiple goals? Without strong data to track their progress, it’s often difficult for governments and businesses to make improvements, respond to problems, and examine trade-offs depending on what priorities are invested in. Decision-makers need reliable information to be able to make evidence-based, informed decisions. Understanding how all the vast components of food systems link up and interact makes for a complex web to navigate.
There have been various efforts undertaken to improve the quality, access, and sophistication of food systems data. Several global databases and indices have been created that provide food-related data each with its own strengths, such as the Food Sustainability Index, Food and Agriculture (FAO) Hand in Hand, FAOSTAT, International Food Policy Research Institute’s (IFPRI) Global Food Security Portal, among others.
A new addition to the data revolution on food systems is the Food Systems Dashboard. It describes food systems by bringing together extant data across more than 200 indicators drawn from more than 40 sources for nearly every country and territory in a visually appealing, user-friendly platform. These sources, which are both public and private, include United Nations agencies, the World Bank, Consultative Group for International Agriculture Research (CGIAR), Euromonitor, and cross-country project-based datasets. The data provide insights into different aspects of food systems that are not commonly included together in other food systems data visualization tools, thus allowing users to understand them in a more comprehensive, democratized way. The Dashboard includes indicators across a wide range of sectors—agriculture, food prices, retail, marketing, diets, nutrition, health, climate change, urbanization, poverty, literacy, and others—that operate within, connect to, and interact with dynamics and complexity of food systems.
With all of these fantastic indices, portals, and dashboards out there to make food data more accessible, there are still limitations.
First, many indicators, including those on consumer behavior and food safety, lack data for the majority of countries globally. And the data that is available often lacks innovation. Crowdsourcing, real-time monitoring, big data are all underutilized or not accessible in food systems research.
Second, along with data gaps, the data typically exist only at the national level. There is a clear need for more detailed, subnational food systems data that are reconciled and harmonized with national statistics. Food systems are incredibly diverse within a country and require nuanced assessments using local data to adequately characterize their dynamics and local characteristics.
Third, very few databases provide an assessment of the performance of national or subnational food systems across a range of outcomes nor do they provide any policy recommendations on how to transform food systems to achieve a set of outcomes.
Fourth, dashboards and indices don’t necessarily show how the data interact or the dynamic relationships—what are the trade-offs if one part of the system is prioritized over another?
Despite the burden we’re placing on food systems to deliver across many goals of sustainable development, we still know relatively little about them. This is ironic being that the UN is calling for a “Food Systems Summit” in about two months. The Food Systems Dashboard and the many other tools out there aim to change that by improving the ability to understand food systems, diagnose where they are strong or weak, and help decide which policies are feasible to transform food systems toward better dietary, health, environmental, and economic outcomes in the near term and for the future.