Giving Compass' Take:

• The Rockefeller Foundation writes that we must focus on a system that prioritizes nutrient-rich food to reduce or eventually eliminate hunger.

• Better food certainly plays a role in health, but the writer also notes the impact on the environment. How can donors support our food system?

• Read about how to accelerate entrepreneurship in the food system. 

Life is improving for most people around the world. According to the World Bank, the percentage of the world’s population living with less than $1.90 per day (the poverty line) dropped from 11.2 to 10 percent between 2013 and 2015, a great achievement. Yet, as economic prosperity rises around the world, diets deteriorate at an alarming and unprecedented pace.

After World War II, governments around the world established the current multilateral system—a global institutional form, and group of organizations, that coordinates relations among states on the basis of generalized principles of conduct, and made eradicating famine and hunger a top priority. That shift coupled with subsequent efforts like the Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals galvanized political will and financial support to establish a global food system geared towards eliminating hunger. For decades, eliminating hunger was the foundation of peace and stability at the national, regional, and global level.

The Rockefeller Foundation played a prominent role in that history. We helped launch the Green Revolution and supported its subsequent achievements while seeking to address the environmental and social challenges it created. And yet, those efforts have also been blindly fixated on a food system’s quantity at the expense of its quality or impact on the environment.

If we are to solve our nutrition and environmental crises, we need to start by addressing our daily food choices.
While effective in terms of reducing hunger, these historical efforts have prioritized a system that optimizes for calories over nutrients.

Food companies have invested heavily in marketing and increasing availability of energy-dense, nutrient-poor, and ultra-processed foods. Simply put, the collective focus has been on providing a growing population with sufficient quantity of food, without paying attention to whether that food was beneficial for human health or produced in an environmentally-friendly manner. The consequences created by this imbalance are dire.

Read the full article about optimizing our food system by Rafael Flor at The Rockefeller Foundation.