Better

Five years on from the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it looked as if a corner was haltingly being turned. The progress report of 2005 found poverty rates falling, albeit mostly in Asia; five regions approaching universal school enrolment – though not sub-Saharan Africa; the gender gap closing, but too slowly; child mortality shrinking, yet not fast enough; and so on.

Within this pattern of notable yet uneven achievement, the food crisis of 2007–2008 represented both a major stumbling block and a springboard for change. The reform of the Committee on World Food Security, completed in 2009, brought a more holistic and collective approach to policy. Governments turned their attention to the governance of food security in realizing the right to food, encapsulated in the Five Rome Principles for Sustainable Global Food Security that were established at FAO’s World Summit on Food Security, also held in 2009. With volatile prices disrupting food markets again in 2010–2011, FAO’s Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS) was born at the request of the Group of Twenty (G20). The interagency platform assesses global food supplies to coordinate policy action in times of market uncertainty and crisis, bringing together the principal trading countries of agricultural commodities.

Crises notwithstanding, poverty continues to drop during this period – dramatically so in China – laying the groundwork for a corresponding drop in hunger. In 2000 already, FAO had launched a strategy to end hunger in the Horn of Africa, which coincided with a streak of breakneck economic growth in previously famished, 100-million strong Ethiopia.

And indeed hunger, as measured by FAO and UN partners in the annual The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, diminishes drastically as the new century rolls on, accompanied by a stronger focus on the quality of food.

In 2014, the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2) is held at FAO headquarters. The conference adopts the Rome Declaration on Nutrition and the Framework for Action, committing to addressing malnutrition in all its forms. It revitalizes international cooperation on nutrition, sets specific targets and accountability mechanisms, and emphasizes the need to “transform food systems to ensure access to adequate, safe, diversified, and nutrient-rich food for all”.

It further lays the foundation for the United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition (recently extended by the UN General Assembly to 2030), where FAO continues to lead work on the transformation of agrifood systems for nutrition, as well as governance, food safety, and nutrition education.

A host of other measures of well-being improve. In 2015, a galvanized international community steps up the pace with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The world is now looking to cover all bases: there are as many as sixteen goals, plus a methodological one, mapping every avenue of social and environmental progress, from health to gender equality to life below water. A further 169 targets mark out areas of action, complete with over 200 indicators.

Prominent among the SDGs, just behind the paramount priority of ending poverty, is Zero Hunger. FAO provides technical input as the Goals are formulated and becomes the UN-designated custodian agency for a variety of indicators. Among these are hunger itself; agricultural sustainability; women’s ownership of land; water stress; fish stocks sustainability; and sustainable forest management. (Much later, in 2025, a new indicator is created – minimum dietary diversity (MDD) – with FAO and UNICEF awarded joint custodianship.)

As FAO’s responsibilities expand, so does its toolbox. The Organization steps up its data collection capacity with a new Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), a hunger-as-felt (as opposed to hunger-as-externally-determined) index. It develops applications that connect smallholders to markets, help manage livestock and control the spread of crop-destroying pests. Drones take to the skies to assess the risk of natural disasters. Educational programmes set out to mentor young farmers and rejuvenate the agricultural labour force. Training is rolled out on how to start urban and indoor farms, tunnel gardens and hydroponic orchards. Indigenous Peoples’ time-honed techniques and intimate knowledge of territory are recognized and melded into efforts to design a food-secure future.

Much emphasis at FAO now falls on strengthening “food value chains”: these offer small farmers outlets for their produce and ensure quality control; they provide decent jobs and help marginalized communities meet demand for niche and premium foodstuffs. Logistical solutions are devised, and intense advocacy is deployed, to reduce loss and waste, which FAO values at some USD 400 billion annually.

Above all, the Organization begins to rethink agrifood systems in their entirety and campaign for their transformation, aiming for a virtuous policy circle that combats poverty, fights hunger and malnutrition, and protects fragile ecosystems. It starts to work with countries to produce “food systems-based dietary guidelines” – tailored, actionable roadmaps for combating malnutrition.

All this, that said, takes place against the hostile clock of extreme climate variability and environmental degradation. Biodiversity – now widely recognized as the bedrock of agricultural production, food security and nutrition – is in decline. A third of the world’s soils are degraded; water scarcity puts the livelihoods of billions at risk, as rising demand for livestock products intensifies pressure on natural resources. The pool of edibles tightens: two-thirds of crop production relies on just nine plant species.

In parts of the world, traditional farming practices die out; elsewhere, homogenized diets, rich in calories but poor in nutrients, stoke a surge in obesity. Diet-related non-communicable diseases are spreading in both adults and children, amid suggestions that an abundance of ultraprocessed foods may have durably altered the human microbiota – the myriad microbial cells that populate our gut. A staggering three billion people around the world, FAO finds, cannot afford the most basic healthy diet. Against this background, the establishment by FAO of Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS), a form of terroir recognition, seeks to rescue, revive and popularize unjustly marginalized local food cultures. By September 2025, over 100 such systems had been recognized. Among the latest – southern Italy’s Amalfi lemons, grown pesticide-free in the shadow of chestnut trees; and some 30 varieties of mikan, the “Japanese mandarin”, ripening on stone-terraced orchards just south of the densely populated Kansai corridor.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic, beyond its toll in human lives and lost output, deepens fragilities in humankind’s relationship with food. The episode is an impromptu litmus test for the precariousness of rural employment, for the brittleness of distribution networks, for the thin line which in many countries divides livelihoods from destitution. FAO’s immediate response is to advocate for continued open markets. Longer term, the Organization launches an all-out pursuit of partnerships and innovation. As the pandemic rages, a position of FAO Chief Scientist is created. A Science and Innovation Strategy follows two years later: it sets out to put greater technological muscle behind FAO’s normative guidance.

Still in 2020, a new FAO signature project, the Hand-in-Hand Geospatial Platform, unlocks a power of data to help agriculture experts, economists, government and non-government agencies, and other players for targeted agrifood interventions. Two new forest- and land-monitoring platforms, Open Foris and SEPAL (System for Earth Observation Data Access, Processing and Analysis for Land Monitoring), provide access to satellite data and processing capabilities powered by cloud-based super computers, using Google Earth Engine technology.

Yet one condition for generalized progress is missing. Into the third decade of the new millennium, lengthy armed conflict acquires a tragic normality. In the Syrian Arab Republic, South Sudan, Yemen and northeast Nigeria, hostilities rage or simmer for years, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives and leaving millions on the edge of famine. In 2022, “breadbasket” Ukraine falls prey to conflict. In 2023, it is Sudan and Gaza. Several years prior, the dispiriting kinship between food insecurity and conflict had been explicitly recognized by the UN Security Council.

As one of the largest publishers in the UN system, with nearly 1 000 volumes produced in various languages every year, and one of a tight set of agencies actively pursuing information integrity as a public good, FAO has given itself guidelines on the responsible use of AI in publishing: from rules on authorship to the intersection of AI and peer review. The Organization is meanwhile making virtually all its research open access, and working with platforms such as Wikipedia to make it easier to find. A new “knowledge repository” came fully online in 2025. The David Lubin Library, for its part, is digitizing its collection, which may constitute the most valuable resource on food and agriculture ever assembled.

Gone, in short, are the early days of FAO as a diffuser of existing technical expertise: the Organization is fast becoming a generator and disseminator of knowledge, both theoretical and applied, both in partnership and in its own right. Monitoring biomass water productivity through remote sensors; interactive platforms for post-harvest systems management; or agricultural insurance over blockchain, with smart contracts connected to satellite-generated weather data and linked to mobile wallets – all are in the research phase or being implemented.

The process is occurring as governments adopt frameworks to channel innovation. Country after country is seeking to harvest the benefits of the bioeconomy. The European Union’s Farm to Fork Strategy has laid down the objective of a fair, healthy, environmentally conscious regional agrifood system. In early 2025, following disquiet from farming communities across the continent, the European Commission’s Vision for Agriculture and Food placed “ensuring the future of our farmers” at the forefront of its approach, thus tying social outcomes into any forthcoming food policies.

Such multiplying initiatives put the onus on FAO to foster enabling environments for implementation, in the form of analytical input, applied knowledge and regulatory systems. In 2019, for example, Members tasked FAO with devising a mechanism that harmonizes policies and standards in the digitalization of food production. Projects with this level of complexity engage multiple forms of institutional capacity, whether technical or governance-related, from data protection to reducing the risk of bias to addressing the digital divide.

Through all this, FAO’s role as a convener and facilitator of policy delivery has only grown. The last five years have seen the Organization’s entire thrust and activity brought under the theoretical umbrella of the “four betters”: better production, better nutrition, a better environment and a better life. A new Strategic Framework comes into being, in which the four betters become an organizing principle to mobilize for the achievement of FAO's mandate, reflecting and building on the interconnected economic, social and environmental dimensions of agrifood systems. These interlinkages tend to manifest themselves in three main areas: agricultural productivity, environmental impact and social sustainability (with the proviso that productivity is mainly linked to economic sustainability). FAO’s agrifood systems approach thus casts agriculture, beyond its production and macroeconomic functions, as the means to realize food security and resilient livelihoods, promote innovation, and catalyse investment and partnerships.

As part of the four betters approach, more flexible partnership formats – South–South and triangular cooperation, but also the trade- and business-focused One Country One Priority Product programme or the Blue Growth Initiative – are created or revived for a more capillary flow of development ideas and solutions. The young’s potential as the constituency to drive change is recognized: in 2021, the Youth Committee of FAO launches the World Food Forum, a platform geared towards reshaping agrifood systems, including through research competitions and startup challenges.

Ever since the Milan Expo of 2015, with its “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life” theme, the agendas of FAO and its host country, Italy, have dovetailed to remarkable effect. The Matera Declaration on Food Security, Nutrition and Food Systems issued at the G20 Summit held in the southern Italian town, set the bases for a Food Coalition centred on systemic resilience. This institutional bond with both the Italian Government and the City of Rome, for an organization generously hosted among the capital’s most cherished sights, has likely never been stronger since the days of the International Institute of Agriculture, well before the birth of the Italian Republic itself.

While increasingly digital, FAO is ever more a presence “in the city”. In October 2025, to mark FAO’s 80th anniversary and World Food Day, the Food and Agriculture Museum and Network (FAO MuNe) opens at the Organization’s headquarters in Rome as a permanent exhibition and educational space. It showcases the significance of global agrifood systems, food traditions, scientific and innovative advancements; and the roles of women, youth, and Indigenous Peoples in building a sustainable food future through the framework of the four betters.

Much needs to change as we pursue our quest for food security, and much no doubt will, some in ways hardly predicable. The last 80 years have seen landscapes shift, countries form and dissolve. The faces of agriculture have morphed, the app has edged out the plough. Poverty has turned to abundance, though not everywhere, not always durably, and amid persistent or resurgent instability. Food itself has changed, and so too has our biological and cultural understanding of it. The machine mind and digital native generations will no doubt further transform the way food is grown and consumed. Yet through all this, FAO’s mission – to see the right to plentiful and diverse foods universally recognized and respected – endures. In times propitious and in times less so, through vagaries economic and political, with the compass of humanity and science to guide us.