While all stakeholders – that is, the world population – have a stake in taking action to ensure sustainable and inclusive agrifood systems transformation, governments have a significant role to play, given the levers at their disposal to affect markets, incentives, infrastructure, laws and regulations. Nonetheless, efforts to transform agrifood systems – whether government-led or in partnership with governments – need to be informed through stakeholder engagement.
As a first step, understanding the distribution of the quantified hidden costs across the agrifood systems categories provides important context for the necessary next steps in agrifood systems transformation. Detailed analysis of health hidden costs due to NCDs by agrifood systems category underlines the differences in the most important dietary risks, which are dominated by diets low in whole grains and high in sodium in terms of magnitude. Hidden costs of diets low in fruits and vegetables are highest in protracted crisis and traditional categories and mostly decrease as countries transition towards industrial agrifood systems. Hidden costs due to diets high in red and processed meat show an ever-increasing pattern. Considering that these food and nutrient groups are components of a healthy diet, countries can incorporate such assessments into the design of FBDGs to address quantified health hidden costs and ensure a healthy diet for all. Complementary levers such as labelling, information, nudges, taxes and subsidies are discussed in detail in Chapter 4.
This chapter explores the varying fiscal and institutional capacities among agrifood systems and highlights the unique circumstances of those in the protracted crisis category. Further global, regional and national scenarios provide opportunities to explore potential future pathways that can help chart a vision for transformation at both global and national level. While this global transformation is a process that can be aspired to, national commitments and actions will, necessarily, be the building blocks for change.
The case studies showing the TCA approach at the national level underscore the importance of inclusive stakeholder consultation. The targeted TCA study conducted in Switzerland showcases the importance of incorporating TCA applications into existing national processes with broad-based stakeholder participation and a flexible approach. It also highlights the need to expand the scope of the work conducted by this report to include other hidden cost domains – for example, soil degradation, biodiversity, AMR or imports – that may be deemed relevant to national agrifood systems sustainability.
Global agrifood systems generate innumerable benefits for all actors, but also hidden costs and inequality between cost producers and cost bearers, as demonstrated by the models discussed in this chapter. National governments and intergovernmental organizations have a pressing responsibility to pinpoint the causes of inequality and identify how to transfer resources from current beneficiaries of hidden cost production to those who bear the costs. This responsibility is complicated and amplified when cost bearers are in a different country or not even born yet. Governments’ role is discussed further in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, which zoom in on the value of transformation for actors in food supply chains and consumers, respectively. The most challenging elements of all – the distributional challenges and the political economy constraints that can stifle government action – are discussed in Chapter 5.
