One of the most striking images of the coronavirus pandemic is the contrast between farmers dumping milk, smashing eggs, and plowing vegetables back into the soil and consumers facing empty store shelves and long lines at food distribution centers. How is it possible to have over-abundance on one hand and scarcity on the other?
This article argues it is vital to correct pervasive information asymmetries and transaction costs across a vast food system (Figure 1) to move toward a more inclusive, resilient and sustainable model. While large-scale industrial food production accompanied by just-in-time supply chains have produced many gains, the hazards of this system are increasingly visible on the horizon. The digital revolution offers the possibility of an alternative equilibrium, one where small-scale, flexible organizational and production systems flourish and nimbly navigate a changing operating environment. Small and interconnected may well be our salvation: the hundreds of shallow-draft ships that saved the day in Dunkirk, during World War II, when troops were pinned to the coast and large personnel carriers were no longer seaworthy, come to mind.

All of us, 7.7 billion and counting, participate in the food system in one way or another. We make decisions about the food we consume, the clothes we wear and the products we use – much of which originate in agriculture. Agricultural goods are produced on 570 million farms, most of them small, run by families, and located in developing countries. Food systems are local, an essential feature in communities—but also global, linked through trade and sophisticated financial and insurance markets.

Despite providing food for a world population that has more than doubled over the past 50 years, the food system is severely off course in helping us achieve Sustainable Development Goals related to hunger, poverty, health, land use and climate change. Although we’re producing plenty of food globally, the number of undernourished has been rising since 2014 (Figure 2). One in five children under the age of five is stunted producing lifelong negative consequences on productivity. Some two billion people are overweight or obese, resulting in noncommunicable diseases of dietary origin that compromise resistance to new diseases such as the coronavirus. Agriculture contributes 24 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, consumes 70 percent of fresh water, and has caused the loss of 60 percent of vertebrate biodiversity since the 1970s. The cost of these negative externalities is $12 trillion according to the Food and Land Use Coalition, outweighing a market value of $10 trillion.
Now, an additional 100 million people are under threat of poverty because of the economic impacts of the pandemic, according to the June 2020 Global Economic Prospects report, pushing us further from our goals by shrinking incomes and creating food and nutrition access challenges that may result in large-scale famine according to the World Food Programme.
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