3. Challenges, triggers and strategic policy options
To shift agrifood systems towards sustainability and resilience, several “triggers of change” are available that can be taken advantage of. These are areas of development that, because of their transformative potential, deserve particular attention, institutional boosts, and skills and organizational suitability in order to accelerate transformative processes. Key priority triggers identified by FAO’s CSFE, and later incorporated in FAO Strategic Framework 2022–31, comprise:
- institutions and governance
- consumer awareness
- income and wealth distribution
- innovative technologies and approaches.
Considered as effective starting points, or accelerators of transformative processes, these triggers are expected to mutually interact and influence important drivers of agrifood systems and, through them, spread impacts throughout all agrifood, socioeconomic and environmental systems to achieve desired outcomes (see Figure 1.1).
Triggers for transformation are all expected to mutually interact and have systemic impacts on agrifood systems and on the context within which they develop. Whether they will be activated or disabled, the modalities of their utilization and the extent of their effectiveness will definitely influence the future that could develop according to a “more of the same” type of scenario, or move away towards alternative futures.6 Table 3.1 portrays how the various triggers could be activated or deactivated to determine the four scenarios presented in this report.
TABLE 3.1 TRIGGERS AND SCENARIOS
| Triggers\Scenarios | MORE OF THE SAME (MOS) | ADJUSTED FUTURE (AFU) | RACE TO THE BOTTOM (RAB) | TRADING OFF FOR SUSTAINABILITY (TOS) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Institutions and governance | Public institutions will progressively lose the power to orient and regulate economies and societies because of the emergence of private entities allegedly supplying public goods. Some civil society movements will question this drift with no success, given the limited space left to independent media and other communication channels. In fact, media and data platforms will progressively become concentrated in the hands of a few private entities tied to economic powers. Thus, the governance of global goods, such as peace, climate, health, oceans, etc. will progressively weaken to the detriment of sustainable agrifood systems. | When the failure of Agenda 2030 becomes evident, multilateral institutions will manage to act on a limited number of social targets. Some countries, pressured by collective action, will address the political economy challenge to reach compromises among citizens, parliaments and private lobbies, and will manage to address some trade-offs and reinforce regulations to reduce GHG emissions, improve food safety, control chemicals’ use and safeguard biodiversity. In other countries, conflicts of interest between public decision-makers and private lobbies, big agrifood companies and small-scale farmers, will prevent substantial changes from taking place. Lack of global coordination, power asymmetries and systemic governance weaknesses will hamper results at national and global scales. | Governments, steered by elites acting under the influence of few powerful actors, will increasingly become more authoritarian. Private sector companies will be closely allied with governments, as they will create rules that favour said companies. Governance of global issues will progressively weaken to favour economic interests of the elites over environmental and social ones, while few attempts of civil society movements to oppose this system will fail. International organizations will be diverted from their original goals through underfunding, thus forcing them to embrace dubious public-private global partnerships and fictitious “global alliances”, that progressively will replace them. Thus, global commons will drastically degrade with dramatic consequences. | The mobilization of real and representative civil society and other organizations will lead to the emergence of more effective participatory and novel, multilevel governance models resulting in a balanced power distribution across the state, civil society organizations, the United Nations, academia, trade unions, farmers organizations and private corporations. To address global challenges, the world will reverse the piecemeal governance of the early decades of the century to adopt a more integrated approach by strengthening transparency and through the provision of public goods at global, regional and national levels. Although setting and enforcing global agreements on GHG emissions and sustainable agriculture standards will be difficult, owing to the implied costs of adopting new technologies, some success will be achieved, with long-run positive impacts on agrifood systems. |
| Consumer awareness | Consumers will be induced by advertising campaigns to consume foods alleged to be healthy and sustainable. However, limited verifiable information will prevent consumers’ associations from acting as effective counterparts. Regulations for increasing transparency will be biased thanks to lobbying. Despite some awareness, low-price, highly processed foods with poor nutritional value will be massively consumed because of limited incomes of many people. | Governments, to accommodate an increasing request of transparency on the quality, and social and environmental sustainability of food from the public and consumers’ associations, will reinforce measures regarding labelling and traceability. Consumers’ associations will attempt to induce behavioural changes. However, food transnationals, claiming excessive costs, will manage to water down such initiatives. The lack of global coordination favoured the avoidance of norms, thus limiting overall results. | Consumer awareness about the quality and sustainability of foods will progressively shrink, owing to the progressive reduction of public goods such as education and freedom of expression. Consumers’ associations will be purposely weakened, including through legal prosecution, as they will tell uncomfortable truths regarding the quality of food and the sustainability of food production. Thus, the removal of citizens’ power will fully deactivate a key trigger of transformation. | Consumer awareness will increase, thanks to a combination of coordinated public policies, including education and critical thinking in schools, and behavioural changes generated by consumers’ associations. Through an organized movement at global, national and local levels, citizen consumers will gain power to become an active party in the transformation of agrifood systems. Despite initial attempts to disqualify the consumers’ movements favouring sustainable production, transnationals will realize that collaboration with consumers will actually pay off. |
| Income and wealth distribution | Improving income and wealth distribution would be a must, given the food price increases caused by the tightening natural resources and the billions of people that cannot afford healthy diets. Unfortunately, income and wealth distribution will worsen, given the diminished fiscal space that will entail the reduction of publicly funded social protection programmes along with the privatization of basic public goods such as education, health care services, and security. Additionally, the reduction of jobs, wages and trade unions’ strength, owing to increasing capital and information intensity of production processes, will compound the dire situation. | Faint-hearted taxes on profits of transnationals in information and communication technology and “big oil”, and to some extent on fiscal dumping, will be imposed. These will bring mixed results, owing to diverging interests of various countries. However, both in LMICs and HICs, some fiscal space will be created to fund last-minute actions for SDG1 and 2, and to act against the mounting inequalities resulting from a jobless growth in some sectors, and a rampant gig economy elsewhere. Trade unions will regain strength to adjust to labour market asymmetry in negotiating power. Overall, poverty, hunger and food insecurity will decrease around 2030, but only temporarily. | Fiscal competition, and fear of losing investment capital and associated jobs, will continue to discourage governments from billing the richer classes. In this context, rent-seeking from transnationals, including in agrifood systems, will be exacerbated. Very weak institutions at all levels will allow power accumulation and extraction of huge rents from agrifood value chains, while wages and job security will be sacrificed, also because of the non-existent trade unions. Owing to all that, income and wealth distribution will dramatically worsen. Dysfunctional agrifood systems will exhibit increasing food prices with disastrous consequences on poverty, food security and hunger. | Although in a context of limited economic growth because of the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, and in a context where investment in new sustainable technologies was favoured compared to household consumption, some achievements to reduce hunger will materialize thanks to social protection policies strictly targeting the neediest social groups. In the long run, equitable taxation, aware trade unions, improved public services and well-designed social protection programmes as well as the development of novel, accessible and sustainable technologies will help reduce inequality, poverty and hunger in a sustainable manner. |
| Innovative technologies and approaches | Science will progress and support innovation, but investment will be concentrated in a few HICs. A fragmented and ever more competitive multipolar system will facilitate the acceptance of doubtful biotechnologies, owing to neglected precautionary principles and weak global regulations. Agroecological and other environment-friendly approaches will be developed only to a limited extent. AI and machine learning will facilitate agricultural robotics, and soil and crop monitoring. However, the few investors controlling these technologies will have no incentives to transfer or adapt them to multi-cropping or small-scale systems. | Science and innovation will contribute to eliminate the risk of a quite likely collapse. Although the emphasis put in the 2020s on digitalization will prove to be excessive, some applications, such as soil, crop and animal monitoring through remote sensing and other IoT applications, will prove to be very useful. However, to quickly ensure affordable healthy diets by increasing land and water productivity, LMICs will become the experimental field for strong genetic manipulations. However, insufficient testing and lack of knowledge of the systemic implications will prove most of them to be unsustainable and will give way to more controllable biotechnologies. | Instead of facilitating the adoption of sustainable techniques, digitalization will be increasingly used to control value chains at all levels. Digital equipment will be increasingly provided almost for free to smallholders by a few transnationals controlling big data and AI systems to obtain strategic digital information. Private investment in agrifood systems will mainly originate from export-oriented transnationals in global value chains to take over smaller national businesses and make mass land acquisitions. Thus, in many instances, large numbers of farmers will become landless and jobless, and forced to urbanize or migrate abroad. The pioneering attempts to adopt integrated agroecological and agroforestry approaches will become remote dreams. | After a period of uncertainty, digitalization, IoT and AI worked for people and sustainable development thanks to a new global governance of big data generation, use and ownership. This process, demanded by civil society, independent academia and some governments, will be fully supported and facilitated by the relevant United Nations bodies. The gains from technological innovation will not only prioritize previously neglected populations in LMICs, but also sustainable, resilient and integrated agrifood systems. Thus, priority will be given to scientific research and development geared towards approaches that meet the needs of the great variety of agroecological and social conditions. |
Source: Authors’ elaboration.
Triggers of change need to be exploited through context-specific actions that require a clear evidence-based design, effective implementation, and constant monitoring of processes and outcomes. Selected strategic policy options to move agrifood systems towards sustainability – not only for the relatively short-term of Agenda 2030, but beyond it to 2050 and 2100 – emerged during the CSFE. This exercise also catalysed strategy and policy proposals already expressed in recent FAO flagship reports, documents from Regional Conferences and other corporate documents.
Selected strategy and policy options are proposed in the last part of the full report, with no pretence at being exhaustive. They are organized according to the main trigger of change they are likely to activate, notwithstanding the fact that trigger strategies and policies are intertwined in most practical contexts, and therefore a single strategic option may activate more than one trigger.7
- 6. Some “triggers” identified bear direct linkages with key drivers highlighted here, such as the trigger “Income and wealth distribution” through which inequalities are expected to be addressed. Other triggers, such as “Institutions and governance” are more systemic in nature and may trigger first round impacts on different sets of drivers.
- 7. Most of these strategic policy options were identified during the CSFE and in the technical papers provided as background documents to this report by technical divisions. Others refer to recent corporate reports, FAO flagship publications and documents of Regional Conferences.