3.5 Map and pathways of the food transition

Map of the food system

The food system is a collection of processes intertwined with the energy system and land use. At the heart of the food system are the food chains from field to table. Resources flow from fertilizers and primary agricultural production, through harvesting and industrial processing, to sales and finally to people's plates at homes, schools, workplaces and restaurants.

The functioning of food chains is determined by the drivers or inputs to the food system: environmental, political, economic, socio-cultural and technological factors that influence what food is possible and profitable to produce and how (and where). Outputs result from the interaction of drivers and food chains. The main output is food, and related to this, the main objective is food security, i.e. a situation where all people have continuous access to adequate nutrition through culturally acceptable methods and foods. Food security enables active living and the pursuit of well-being. Other significant outputs of the food system are socio-economic impacts (livelihood, employment, health) and environmental impacts.

 

Food system. At the heart of the system are food chains, which are driven by a number of drivers or inputs, such as different human systems and environmental conditions. The outputs of food chains include nutrition and food security, livelihoods and other socio-economic impacts, and environmental impacts. Photo by The Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).

Food system transition, or food transition, is essential for overall sustainability transition and planetary well-being. The environmental impacts that require food system change relate to land, water and air. The main environmental impacts of the global food system are (around 2020):

• Land use: about half of the world's unfrozen and fertile land,
• Climate impact: 23–42% of all GHG emissions,
• Freshwater use: about 70% of the fresh water used by humans,
• Eutrophication: phosphorus and nitrogen cycles that alter aquatic ecosystems,
• Overfishing: a third of the world's fish stocks are overfished and 60% are "fully fished", i.e. close to the limit of overfishing; and
• Resource waste: around a third of the world's food is wasted. In low-income countries, wastage is concentrated in the harvesting and storage stages of the food chain, while in higher-income countries it is concentrated in the retail, restaurant and household stages.

The first part of the food chain, primary food production, is by far the most significant source of climate and nature impacts in the food system. Around four fifths of the food system's GHG emissions come from agricultural activities: land use, i.e. soil tillage and land clearing. For example, in the 2020 calculation regarding Finnish food chain, agriculture accounted for 88% of the climate impact of food chains; processing industry, wholesale and retail trade, transport and catering activities (e.g. energy used for cooking in restaurants) accounted for 12%. Almost 90% of global deforestation, a key cause of biodiversity loss, is due to agricultural expansion.

 

The food system accounts for 26% of global GHG emissions, according to Moore & Nemecek (2018). In the food system, emissions are caused by animal husbandry and fishery (31%), the cultivation of crops for human and animal consumption (27%), land use and land use change (24%, e.g. land clearing) and product supply chains (18%, e.g. packaging and transport).

The environmental impacts depend mostly on what food is produced, but also on the production methods. The most significant environmental impacts are related to meat production based on animal husbandry (e.g. cattle, pigs, sheep) due to land use. Animal husbandry accounts for about half of the climate impact of the food system and three quarters of agricultural land use, but produces less than 20% of food in terms of energy and 37% in terms of protein production.

The main cause of the environmental impact of animal production is the need for animals to eat, not only to survive but also to grow. For four-legged farmed animals, gaining one kilogram of weight usually requires eating between 3 and 10 kilograms of feed. For birds, this is between 2 and 2.5 kg of feed, partly because of the extreme stocking density (i.e. birds do not need energy to move because they cannot move). Meat production requires large amounts of grazing land and forage production, which requires an ever-increasing area of land, which is the main reason for land clearing. Globally, the situation is particularly alarming in countries where clearing forests for pasture and forage land is continuous, such as Brazil.

The share of meat in diets has increased with rising living standards. Per capita meat consumption almost doubled in EU countries between the 1960s and the early 2000s, and increased 1.5-fold in the US and other high-income countries (although US meat consumption was already 1.5 times higher than in EU countries in the 1960s). In some countries with rapid economic growth, the change is even more dramatic: for example, in China, meat consumption (kg/person/year) increased from just over 3 kg in the early 1960s to over 60 kg by the end of the 2010s, which, however, is still below EU and US consumption (2019 averages of around 79 kg per capita in the EU and 128 kg per capita in the US, according to FAO statistics). In many cultures, eating meat is a cultural status symbol associated with wealth, which is why strong economic growth and rising living standards are fueling the increase in meat consumption.

 

 

Per capita beef consumption in different countries (x-axis) and the area of the world's habitable land area needed for food production (y-axis) if all people in the world ate the way that a given country does. World food production currently occupies 50% of the habitable land area. The more beef eaten in a state, the more land area the average diet generally requires. In 31 countries, the diet is such that if the entire world population ate the same, it would take virtually all the habitable land area of the planet or more to produce the food eaten. Finland (108.4%) is one of these countries. In turn, the diet of 79 countries would require less habitable land than is currently used for food production. Of these, all but Japan are (low and lower middle income) countries of the so-called Global South.

Of the globally important forage crops, corn, wheat, soy, and pulses would also be suitable for human consumption. Ruminants (i.e. cattle, sheep, goats, etc.) are also able to "convert" grass and hay into edible food for humans, which is why cows and goats, for example, have played an important role in the food security of poor communities in harsh and particularly hot or cold regions. If ruminants graze, they need less separately grown supplementary feed.

Depending on the type of grazing, the production of meat from grazing animals can either contribute to or undermine biodiversity. At best, grazing traditional habitat types such as meadows protects habitats for endangered species. At worst, grazing contributes to large-scale deforestation, as in Brazil, where grazing animals need a significant amount of grazing land. On average, about half a kilo of meat of grazing animal origin requires 320–370 square meters of land, compared to 30–40 square meters in intensive production.

In terms of production methods, industrial fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation and the spread of monoculture (cultivation concentrated on a particular species) have increased yields per hectare. This has enabled feeding a growing population with less arable area, and it is sometimes argued that the most efficient agriculture is the most sustainable agriculture. However, intensive farming has increased soil depletion. The yield levels achieved through intensive production, which impoverishes the soil, cannot be maintained in the long term, and yields begin to decline as soil fertility declines. Fields on depleted lands also become less drought tolerant. Pesticides that have improved crop reliability harm many insect and bird species, as well as workers applying pesticides in poorer working conditions.

The production and overuse of industrial fertilizers has a significant environmental impact. The production of industrial nitrogen fertilizers accounts for 1.4% of global energy consumption. The extraction of phosphorus minerals pollutes local environments. Phosphorus is also a dwindling natural resource, with highly concentrated geographical reserves. There are political risks and human rights concerns associated with phosphorus production: More than 70% of the world's phosphorus minerals are located in Morocco and the Western Sahara region occupied by Morocco, where, according to the accusations made by the Western Sahara Resource Watch organization (WSWR), Morocco illegally mines and exports phosphorus. The overuse of fertilizers also causes eutrophication of water bodies. For example, nitrogen and phosphorus discharges, most of which are caused by agriculture, are the main cause of eutrophication in the Baltic Sea. Wastewater treatment plants have reduced nutrient discharges, but reducing nutrient discharges from agriculture would require curbing fertilizer use and better buffer zones between farmland and water bodies.

Food security depends on planetary well-being

Food production affects many processes that are central to planetary well-being and is also substantially dependent on the functioning of these processes. For example, changes related to biodiversity loss pose significant risks to food production. More than a third of global agriculture benefits from pollinators, most of which are wild animals such as insects, birds and bats. The global status of pollinating insects is poorly understood, but regional surveys have identified up to 40% of species as endangered.

For example, a recent survey found that 37% of European hover flies are threatened with extinction. Although a cautious estimate is that the loss of pollinators would directly reduce global yields by only 5–8% in terms of food kilograms – rice and wheat, for example, are wind-pollinated – the change would jeopardize food security, as pollinator-dependent food crops such as many fruits, vegetables and nuts are very important sources of trace elements and vitamins. Compensating for yield losses in these crops would significantly increase the area under cultivation, as pollinator-dependent crops have relatively low yields. Increasing the area under cultivation could further accelerate the destruction of natural habitats.

Rising temperatures and extreme weather caused by climate change will reduce yields. Although research results are uncertain and there are significant differences between them, the average of recent modellings suggests that global corn yields would fall by up to a quarter from current levels if the climate warms by more than 4 degrees Celsius. Increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels associated with climate change will also affect yields of the world's major food crops over the current century. Yields of some crops, such as wheat, may even increase slightly, as carbon dioxide improves growth rates and more temperate growing areas mean that heat will not be a problem for wheat. However, at the same time, higher CO2 levels also reduce the nutritional value of wheat, so there is little nutritional benefit from the increased yield. Climate change will have the greatest impact on yields in tropical regions, where 85% of the world's extremely poor people live.

Achieving a sustainability transition beyond food systems is therefore essential to secure food production. While new innovations in food production have succeeded in producing food without arable land (or fishing grounds), for example in laboratories using cell cultures, the scale of the inventions is so small and the economic viability in many cases so far from being suitable for commercialization that the role of such inventions will, at least in the near future, be minuscule from a global perspective.

Social sustainability and nutrition

Another prevailing problem of the food system is related to social sustainability: the food system does not provide food security in an equitable way. Officially, according to the FAO, there are about 820 million undernourished people in the world. However, this measure is based on energy deficit measured by the needs of a passive lifestyle and does not take into account nutritional needs and the impact of physical work or human-powered transport. Taking account of these factors, the number of undernourished people is estimated at 1.5 billion. A milder problem is food insecurity: intermittent or long-term lack of food security. For example, people who regularly depend on food aid from the third sector are food insecure even if they are not starving. While food insecurity, which is detrimental to well-being and socially unequalizing, is not well documented, it has become more common even in high-income countries.

However, since reducing the environmental impact of food systems to achieve the sustainability transition is largely a challenge for industrialized and high-income countries, we focus on these countries in this sub-section. For the most part, their populations have excellent access to good nutrition. In 2019, for example, EU citizens spent on average 13% of their income on food (compared to around 30% in the 1950s). On average, good nutrition is not up to money. The modern food system also allows for a wide variety of choices throughout the year and the possibility to buy ready-made food or restaurant food; good nutrition is, therefore, also not a matter of skill or time.

However, even in high-income countries, malnutrition, which is linked to lifestyle diseases such as cardiovascular diseases and type II diabetes, is on the rise and the system is not sustainable in terms of public health. In the modern market-driven food system, wealth, abundance and advertising encourage choices that give a quick feeling of pleasure but are unhealthy. Highly processed or ultra-processed snacks and fast foods are cheap and tasty, but often nutrient-poor and highly energy-dense. In North American countries, more than half of daily energy intake comes from such products; in Europe, the proportion ranges from around 15% to 45%. The consumption of ultra-processed products is also growing strongly in middle-income countries.

Ultra-processing as such does not necessarily have a high environmental impact, as the environmental impact of food is mostly generated by agriculture. In fact, ultra-processed foods often use lower quality raw materials (such as meat-like cuts) and have a good shelf life, which reduces waste compared to fresh raw materials (although overconsumption of products is also a form of food waste). In addition, the already discussed increasing consumption of meat, linked to the rise in living standards and the fall in the price of meat due to intensive production, is a public health problem: the consumption of red and processed meat increases the risk of many diseases. In Finland in 2017, 79% of men and 26% of women consumed red meat above the nutritionally recommended limit of 500 grams per week, with an average yearly consumption beinng around 78 kg. In the 2010s, average meat consumption has already exceeded 70 kg per person per year in a quarter of the world's countries, mostly in high and middle income countries.

From a social sustainability perspective, the income distribution of the modern food system is highly skewed. Farmers and other food producers are often under financial pressure and their activity at the limits of profitability, and additionally, the dependence of yields on weather conditions, especially in crop production, means high economic risks. Highly concentrated food retail generates profits for large companies and retail chains, which have enormous bargaining power over primary producers and small family businesses, for instance. The distribution of income is further skewed by supermarkets’ private label brands, which allows supermarket chains to take a share of the food industry's profits. In addition, ultra-processed foods and the popularity of global brands concentrate power and wealth at global level. The turnover of the world's largest food companies is larger than the national budget of most countries in the world. Ultra-processed products are a key product category for these companies, which is reflected in the availability of the same products around the world. In the food sector, wealth and power are therefore concentrated in companies with an interest in the large-scale sale of unhealthy but attractive food.

 

Global meat consumption per person almost doubled between 1961 and 2013. Pork and poultry consumption grew particularly strongly, as the former doubled and the latter more than quintupled. However, the differences between countries' consumption remained huge in the 2010s: for example, Argentines consumed almost 90 times more beef than Liberians in 2017.

Pathways and means of change

In most modern food systems, the food transition combines two objectives: reducing the environmental impact of food production and promoting healthy diets. At the same time, changes should support improvements in global food security and reduce inequalities in income distribution along food chains. Food transition is a holistic goal and requires driving change through multiple drivers of the food system. Changes are needed in the human systems (markets, culture, public policy) that together determine the opportunities, profitability and appreciation of producing and preparing different types of food.

In contrast to the energy system, where technologies already exist for ultra-low carbon (“clean”) energy production, food production, by definition, generates emissions that are very difficult to avoid, simply through land use and fertilizers. In addition, diverse nutrition requires the cultivation of products with different climate impacts. Therefore, the challenges of food transition are different from those of energy transition. The pathways to food transition have been outlined using the backcasting approach. This approach has allowed for the outlining of future paths that depend on dietary alterations, technological innovations, and changes in land use. Transition requires a combination of different actions, i.e. several pathways. Land use and diets are at the heart of all pathways. We will now briefly look at the governance of land use, diets and technological change.

 

Land use

Land use is linked to diet. The majority of agricultural land is used for the production of food of animal origin. Reducing the consumption of meat and dairy products to a third of the current level and producing the same amount of energy through crop production would free up, for example, more than a third of arable land in Finland. In areas where meat production is concentrated, the impact of land-use changes on livelihood opportunities and the management of such side-effects are a particular challenge. There are often historical reasons for the regional concentration of animal production (such as the cold climate in northern Finland), which in turn have created path dependencies: large amounts of money have been invested in sustaining and developing animal production, and it is easiest to keep to animal production and develop it rather than make new investments and take new production risks in order to pay off debts.

 

 

In Finland, the largest number of dairy farms are in North Ostrobothnia and North Savo (Photo: Lauren Hedges, Pexels.)

 

Land use is driven by environmental conditions, market and agricultural policy. Food production differs from other sectors of production and consumption because of the scale of public financial support it receives. Agricultural subsidies account for between one third and one half of producers' income, and without them production would rarely be economically viable. Subsidy policy therefore has a considerable influence on agriculture. Agricultural subsidies have changed over the decades: for example, subsidies linked to food production volumes, which contributed to regional overproduction of food, have been reduced. However, agricultural subsidies are still not strongly linked to environmental sustainability, but encourage land clearing and climate-unfriendly land use through various mechanisms, such as support elements linked to hectares cultivated. For example, in EU agricultural policy, safeguarding biodiversity would require more accurate monitoring of changes in the status of species, engaging farmers, binding subsidies to results rather than to intended actions, and steering land use at a higher, beyond-farm level. A return from monoculture and intensive production to practices that pay particular attention to ecosystem processes, such as agroecological farming (for more information, see for example the FAO information package), would be particularly important for biodiversity. On the other hand, these changes may even mean a slight increase in GHG emissions per kilogram of food produced, as yields per hectare decrease with decreasing efficiency. However, since the climate impacts of the food system are mostly driven by what is produced for food, the pathway for dietary change is also very important.

 

Diets

Changing diets to be more plant-based is essential for planetary well-being in most high-income countries. Even eating according to nutritional recommendations would be an improvement for the environment and public health. However, to adequately mitigate environmental impacts will require greater changes. This is illustrated by the idea of a planetary health diet, designed to be sustainable from health and environmental perspectives. In many Western countries, a planetary diet would mean

• reducing meat consumption to a fraction of current levels (a sustainable level is around 300 grams per week; current consumption is over a kilogram per week),
• doubling the consumption of vegetables, fruit, pulses and nuts/seeds, and
• reducing sugar consumption to a fraction (e.g. in Finland to a third).

 

 

The planetary plate model presented by researchers illustrates what a health-promoting and climate-friendly diet can look like. Vegetables and whole grains form the basis of the diet. The main sources of protein are plant-based proteins and whole grains. The model diet can be composed in many different ways, depending on regional conditions. Photo by EAT-Lancet Commission.

 

Policy guidance affecting food has tended to focus not only on agriculture but also on the preconditions of food trade. Restrictions focus on food safety (e.g. hygiene regulations, product dating and storage requirements, pesticide safety limits). Many countries also strictly regulate what animals can be produced and sold for food. Marketing is subject to some regulation, especially in modern food systems where advertising is a key part of the food industry. For example, in many countries health claims can only be made under certain conditions; on the other hand, it is easy to circumvent such regulations, for example by advertising a nutrient-poor snack product as being consumed by an athletic person. The food advertising targeted at children in particular has also been a matter of concern for the research community, as it often markets nutrient-poor but energy-dense products.

The main means of guiding people's food choices have been so-called soft policy instruments: education and campaigns, product labeling, and "nudging" people to make better choices for the environment or health. Nudging does not limit the number of options available, but seeks to influence the choice situation so that people are more likely to choose the desirable option. This makes use of people's unconscious psychological tendencies. For example, putting healthy products in prominent places in shops and putting the most environmentally friendly meal at the top of the lunch menu are both examples of nudging. These are called soft policy instruments because they do not require a change in behavior and it is still possible, and often quite easy, to continue one’s old habits. Soft instruments are widely accepted, but they are generally ineffective. Certain nudges have shown their power, however. In buffet restaurants, for example, the link between plate size and the amount of food eaten and wastage is strong; in some studies, larger plate sizes have increased the amount of food eaten by up to one and a half times and led to a doubling of food waste.

Food choices can also be influenced by economic instruments and institutional catering. Economic governance mainly means fiscal governance: increasing VAT on the most harmful products or reducing taxes on the most environmentally friendly and health-friendly products. However, tax changes are often not reflected in prices in the desired way, and the effect may not be sufficient to change choices driven by tastes and habits, so researchers disagree on the effectiveness of taxation as a means of governing food choices.

Institutional catering refers to catering systems with a large number of customers, such as nurseries, schools, staff restaurants and hospitals. The Finnish school meal system, where schoolchildren are provided with a free and nutritionally complete meal, is still a rarity in the world. Free and nutritious school meals promote nutritional equality and teach new eating habits that can last a lifetime. With around 900,000 children and teenagers in Finland eating school meals daily, procurement of raw materials for school meals can make a big difference when more sustainable procurement practices are realized. Institutional catering supported by public sector is also guided by nutrition recommendations. For example, the recommendations on school meals (2017) suggest that vegetarian food should be offered as a choice for all and that environmental criteria should be taken into account, for example in the choice of ingredients. In the 2020s, many projects have been implemented to reduce the climate impact of school meals and develop vegetarian and freshwater fish dishes that children would like to eat.

Large food companies and retail chains play a crucial role in determining what changes can or are likely to occur in fields or on food plates. Retail chains make contracts with producers, processors and wholesalers for the products they buy. Given their economic size and the options available to them (outsourcing), retail chains often have by far the most power to determine the terms of contracts. These conditions affect, for example, the compensation farmers receive and the ease with which local products, for example, can be sold. Consumers are also influenced by the presentation of the products and by the chain's own advertising. In other words, food companies are not just neutral respondents to consumer demand; they play a major role in determining demand and values.

 

Transitions through technology

Technological transitions can affect the way food is produced and consumed. The biggest upheavals at the production level could occur if cellular agriculture or, for example, the production of protein from nitrogen in the air became part of mainstream production somewhere in the world. So far, these solutions are largely niche and will not be solutions of any significant scale in the near future. From a sustainability perspective, the production of meat in a laboratory (cell-cultured in vitro meat) could help address both the climate and land use impacts of meat production and the ethical issues of animal production (see info box) without requiring a change in dietary habits. On the other hand, consumer acceptance of artificial meat is hampered by food attitudes, that is, a fear of novelty, and red meat produced in a laboratory does not address the health issues associated with the high consumption of red meat.

Other technological developments related to production are less revolutionary if they are similar to those that have occurred in the past. Many resource-efficient developments have been introduced throughout the history of food production, from the introduction of draught animals to the invention of tractors and precision fertilization technologies that take account of soil conditions. The most significant change would be the proliferation of forms of production that take place in greenhouses or production facilities, decoupling production from arable land (or water) in. In the future, some food could be grown, for example, in annexes to industrial buildings, where a fish farm or mushroom cultivation based on circular aquaculture (‘recycling’ water) would use the waste resources and heat of another industry. The environmental sustainability of such solutions is not guaranteed, but they could help to reduce land use in the food system and thus both the adverse environmental impacts and the vulnerability of production to changes in the environment.

Technologies related to consumption choices and eating habits are changing the environments that drive both food and food choices. In the case of food technology, the potential of the protein transition pathway is particularly discussed. Here, plant-based innovations with a meat-like texture and nutritional value are driving change: they offer consumers the opportunity to reduce their meat consumption without having to learn new cooking skills and recipes or give up familiar dishes. Product development of new plant proteins has accelerated, especially since the early 2010s, and there is now a wide range of plant-based, meat-like products similar on the market.

Food choice environments are changing, particularly in urban areas, with home-use restaurant food and online food shopping becoming more and more popular. Home-use restaurant services include takeaway, home-delivered and restaurant-prepared meals sold in grocery stores. The proliferation of these services will broaden consumers' meal choices, and services could be directed to encourage more plant-based eating through selection, pricing and nudging – for example, by specifying that in protein options, plant protein is the normal choice and meat must be ordered separately. The opportunities for the sustainability transition offered by online grocery shopping relate to customized nudging: the order in which products are displayed in a virtual grocery store can be tailored to the individual customer. For example, the online store allows the customer to arrange products according to their climate impact, or the app can learn the customer’s preferences and make precise suggestions for new climate-friendly products, rather than having them hidden among thousands of other products in a regular store.

Tensions and sore points

The key tensions in the food transition are centered on the areas targeted by policy measures that aim at undermining the regime. They are also linked to the advantages gained by certain actors in the current power relations of the food system and, ultimately, to the value-laden nature of food: food is of high social and cultural importance, emotion-provoking and perceived as very private.

Since the environmental impacts of the food system are overwhelmingly related to agricultural and other primary production processes, food transition requires intervening in the agricultural policy. Agricultural policy is a key determinant of what food is produced and how. Food transition requires the dismantling of environmentally harmful and conflicting agricultural subsidies and a determined, gradual tightening of regulation on GHG emissions. In the agricultural policy arena, power relations and vested interests are holding back major reforms because there is a reluctance to give up vested interests. For example, the European Union pays direct agricultural subsidies to its member states each year, accounting for around one third of the EU budget (almost €40 billion in 2020), making agricultural subsidies one of the biggest issues in EU policy. Since the money for subsidies is collected from member states, the issues pushed by the largest member states have a major impact on the content of agricultural policy in the EU area as a whole – on the other hand, small countries do not seem to have any significant desire to reform subsidy policy either.

The content of EU agricultural policy is periodically renegotiated. The round of negotiations that decided on the 2023–2027 policy guidelines included a publicly expressed objective to put climate and biodiversity issues at the heart of agricultural policy. However, the scale of the reforms achieved is insufficient in relation to the objectives. Although a common ambition for climate-sustainable, biodiversity-safeguarding agriculture was put on paper, the pathways to the future and their relevance for agricultural policy were not defined. The new agricultural policy program therefore did not become sufficiently concrete and ambitious in terms of reducing GHG emissions.

Member States are left with a lot of leeway in interpreting and monitoring the environmental conditions attached to subsidies, and the risk of losing subsidies if environmental targets are not met is only nominal. In Finland, for example, national subsidies bound in production have played a major role in maintaining milk and beef production across the country. EU agricultural policy has therefore been criticized for continuing the tradition of solely being "primary producer income support" rather than harnessing it to promote the common good and sustainability transition.

The resistance to change appears to be particularly high in agricultural policy. Rather than waiting for the system to be ready for change within itself, it is therefore necessary to create stronger pressure for change from the wider operational environment, for example through environmental policy and the public debate on consumption. What makes agricultural policy transition even more difficult, is not only the need for states to protect their own interests, but also the weak position of the actual agricultural actors, i.e. primary producers, in the current food system. Many farmers are struggling to earn their living. The low profitability of primary production is affected by the dependence of annual incomes on weather conditions (with the risks increasing as climate change causes more and more extreme weather events) and, particularly in the case of animal production, the debt burden on producers, caused by investments in farm expansion and modernization, which have improved profitability. As a result, the capacity of primary agricultural producers to meet the demands of change is weak without significant additional support. If only the best performing farms are able to respond to the demands of change, the change achieved may come at the cost of reduced diversity and resilience of agricultural production in domestic and neighboring markets and increased vulnerability of food systems.

Photo by Thor Edvardsen, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

 

Another sore point of food transition is the dominance of multinational corporations in the global food system and the dominance of retail chains in national food systems. Power and wealth have become highly concentrated in these gatekeepers at the center of the food chains, and large market players have become so central to power and policy making in the food system that it is said that the food system is governed by a hybrid government, formed by public and market sectors.

Companies and retail chains that have benefited from the concentration of power and capital have particularly good resources to promote their own interests and influence public decision-making, both through lobbying and by fostering partnerships. Lobbying includes, for example, the producing, compiling and conveying information to decision- and policy-makers that promotes the interests of companies and retail chains. For example, in the 2009 Clean Energy and Security Act in the US, initial demands for emission reductions in the food system were significantly weakened by a coalition of the industry's largest companies, and the act was eventually overturned in the House. In the US, big agriculture companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to block climate action, and the meat industry has also hired scientific experts to downplay the links between animal production and climate change. The Australian National Food Strategy is another example of corporate power that Rachel Carey's team of researchers have shed light on. The strategy’s overarching theme was sustainability and a holistic food policy (rather than one focused on a particular part of the food chain). However, the industry took over the strategy process so successfully that the final strategy ignored both environmental and health considerations and focused instead on business success and increasing food exports to Asia.

There is also a strong cultural tension associated with food transition. Food is an issue with strong cultural, social and individual identity-related meanings and emotions. In many societies, food and eating choices are seen as private matters. Of course, this is only true in those societies and for those groups of people who have significant opportunities to choose what they eat. Where access to sufficient safe and nutritious food is a challenge, freedom of choice means next to nothing. Privacy of food choices is also often invoked to defend problematic elements of the current food system, such as excessive meat production and consumption. The basic argument is that people should be free to choose their food, even if the choices are unsustainable. However, in this chapter we have learned that the food system and consumption choices are driven by a range of public decisions and subsidy policies. Choices are therefore never actually free – and the current freedom of choice comes at a high price, eroding not only the choices of future generations, but even the most basic preconditions for well-being.

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