Future Food Systems: For people, our planet, and prosperity

It is difficult to envisage a report with more critical implications. By focusing on diets and nutrition across the world, and the food systems that deliver them, it has profound implications for countless millions who endure inadequate diets, and for the world's environmental systems on which every person and every nation depends.

Today, roughly three billion people are unable to afford even the cheapest, locally available, healthy diets. This represents a crisis, not just in terms of health, but also the mental and physical development of children, and the prosperity of families and growth of countries. Worse, it can lead people into lifetime, and even intergenerational, inequality.

This report shows that the underlying problems run deep. Our food systems are failing to produce the foods essential for healthy diets in sufficient quantity and at affordable prices. They are also driving degradation of the natural environment - soil, water and air quality, biodiversity loss and climate change - and dangerously undermining our future well-being.

Since this report was commissioned in 2018, COVID-19 has highlighted just how fragile and precarious the world's food systems have become. The situation is unsustainable.

All of these interlinked crises can be traced back to failures of policy. Put simply, the policies that fed the world in the twentieth century are no longer fit for purpose. Therefore, a key aim of this report has been to set out how to turn the situation around - to promote and protect human and planetary health, and jobs and prosperity.

Using the latest science and evidence, the Global Panel sets out clear steps which need to be taken - by governments, the private sector, development partners, civil society, and citizens.

But, while this report is about action, it will fail at the first hurdle without the political will and courage to reform outdated policies and a sustained commitment to act. The Global Panel therefore urges world leaders to capitalise on forthcoming events in 2021 - the United Nations (UN) Food Systems Summit, the Nutrition for Growth Summit, and the 26th UN Climate Change Conference COP.

It is essential that these meetings are harnessed to catalyse change. The Global Panel hopes that this report will help contribute to a strong foundation for preparing the critical decisions which need to be agreed at those and subsequent events.