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Agriculture systems, which account for a sizable share of global greenhouse gas emissions, are placing a growing burden on the environment while also contributing to increasingly common health problems. Climate change is making the situation worse by reducing agricultural productivity as well as the nutritional content of certain crops, which in turn is driving intensified production to meet global food demand. To break out of this potentially catastrophic feedback loop, societies must realign agricultural policies, financial incentives, and diets to promote health and environmental sustainability.

Ensuring optimal diets and nutrition for the global population is a grand challenge fraught with many contentious issues. To achieve food security for all and protect health, we need functional, equitable, and sustainable food systems. Food systems are highly complex networks of individuals and institutions that depend on governance and policy leadership. This book explains how interconnected food systems and policies affect diets and nutrition in high-, middle-, and low-income countries. In tandem with food policy, food systems determine the availability, affordability, and nutritional quality of the food supply, which influences the diets that people are willing and able to consume. Readers will become familiar with both domestic and international food policy processes and actors, and they will be able to critically analyze and debate how policy and science affect diet and nutrition outcomes.

Front Cover -- Advances in Food Security and Sustainability -- Copyright -- Contents -- Contributors -- Preface -- Chapter One: Managing diversity for food system resilience -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Determining and enhancing resilience of food systems -- 3. Resilience management through diversity -- 4. From diversity to response diversity -- 4.1. Response diversity is not equal to cultivar or genetic diversity -- 4.2. Response diversity enhances yield resilience -- 4.3. Crop diversity in response to weather may depend on soil types -- 4.4. Managing supply chain resilience through response diversity -- 5. What about the trade-off between resilience and efficiency? -- 6. How to measure response diversity -- 6.1. Step 1: Selecting the critical factors of change and variation -- 6.2. Step 2: Estimating component responses to the factors -- 6.3. Step 3: Validating the responses with other data -- 6.4. Step 4: Constructing the response diversity index -- 6.5. Step 5: Assessing response diversity -- 7. Retooling to enable resilience management -- 8. Conclusions -- References -- Chapter Two: Looking at complex agri-food systems from an actor perspective: The case of Northern Thailand -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Food systems and agrarian change -- 3. Methodology -- 4. The case of Mae Chaem and its engagement in global food systems -- 4.1. The animal feed maize incorporation process into global food systems -- 4.2. Animal feed maize supply chain in Mae Chaem -- 4.3. The nature of dependency: Both as producers and consumers: And degrees of agency -- 5. Discussions and conclusions -- References -- Further reading -- Chapter Three: The evolution of food security policy in Lao PDR: Continuity and change in the era of the sustainable deve ... -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Food security policy in Lao PDR from independence to 2000.

AbstractAs part of the roundtable, "Ethics and the Future of the Global Food System," this essay discusses some of the major challenges we will face in feeding the world in 2050. A first challenge is nutritional: 690 million people (9 percent of the world's population) are currently undernourished, while 2.1 billion adults (28 percent of the population) are overweight or obese. The current global food system is insufficient in ensuring that the nutritious foods that make up healthy diets are available and accessible for the world's population. Moreover, by 2050, as the global population increases, food demand will increase by 50–60 percent. A fundamental challenge is meeting this demand while not wreaking irreversible havoc on natural resources, the environment, and planetary systems. A body of scientific research has coalesced around the need to reduce food loss and waste, adopt environmentally sustainable production practices, and shift toward plant-dominant diets. Other long-standing food system problems include deficits in providing fair wages and decent working conditions for food system workers, threats to smallholder farmer livelihoods, and tens of billions of animals kept in welfare-deficit confinement conditions. These food system challenges are bad states of affairs that matter from a variety of moral perspectives. In other words, there is a robust moral case for addressing these challenges. Yet concerted policy action in this area is insufficient and largely absent, pointing to the underlying challenge and complexity of political inertia.

The issue of nutrition had an important moment in the spotlight in 2013. At the nutrition for growth (N4G) summit in London that year, governments, UN agencies, civil society organizations, businesses, donors, and other organizations gathered to consider how to improve nutrition worldwide. Ninety of these stakeholders signed the Global Nutrition for Growth Compact, in which they publicly committed to take concrete action against malnutrition. And the momentum spread further: an additional 20 stakeholders made commitments after the compact was formulated and published. ; PR ; IFPRI1; CRP4; B Promoting healthy food systems ; DGO; A4NH; PHND ; CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH)

The food system is responsible for some of society's most pressing sustainability challenges. Dietary guidelines are one policy tool to help address the multiple sustainability challenges associated with food systems through dietary recommendations that better support environmental and human well-being. This article develops and applies a sustainability framework scoring tool comprised of four key dimensions (environmental, economic, human health, and sociocultural and political) and 32 sub-dimensions of sustainable food systems for the analysis and modification of national dietary guidelines. Two coders pilot tested the framework to quantify the occurrence of sustainability dimensions and sub-dimensions in national and regional dietary guidelines of 12 randomly selected high-income and upper-middle income countries including Albania, Australia, Brazil, the Grenadines, Grenada, Qatar, Netherlands, Nordic Countries, St. Vincent, Sweden, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Sustainability Dimension Scores (SDS) were calculated as a percentage of the occurrence of the eight sub-dimensions comprising each sustainability dimension and Total Sustainability Scores (TSS) were calculated as a percentage of the occurrence of the 32 sub-dimensions in each guideline. Inter-rater reliability of TSS and SDS indicated high validity of applying the sustainability framework for dietary guidelines. SDS varied between the four sustainability dimensions with human health being the most represented in the dietary guidelines examined, as hypothesized (average SDS score of 83%; range from 50 to 100%). Significant differences (p < 0.0001) were found in mean SDS between the four sustainability dimensions. Overall, results indicate that the ecological (average SDS score of 31%; range from 0 to 100%) economic (average SDS score of 29%; range from 0 to 100%), and socio-cultural and political (average SDS score of 44%; range of 0–100%) dimensions of sustainability are underrepresented in the examined national dietary ...

"This book aims to explore what the current state of knowledge is on the role of agricultural biodiversity in improving nutrition and food security. The book will examine and challenge some of the prevailing myths and assumptions to improving nutrition through agriculture mechanisms so as to identify the key research and implementation gaps"--

ON JUNE 8, 2013, THE GOVERNMENTS OF THE UNITED KINGDOM AND BRAZIL, AND THE CHILDREN'S INVESTMENT FUND FOUNDATION (CIFF) HOSTED A SUMMIT IN London titled "Nutrition for Growth: Beating Hunger through Business and Science" (known as N4G). The objective of the summit was to mark a "seminal declaration by leaders to scale up political commitment, increase resources, and take urgent action on nutrition" (United Kingdom 2013, 1). ; PR ; IFPRI1; CRP4; B Promoting healthy food systems ; A4NH; PHND ; CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH)