This is a crucial moment for the world’s food systems. Hunger has been on the rise since 2015, and 3 billion people cannot afford healthy diets. At the same time, food systems are placing unsustainable demands on the world’s water and energy resources and contributing a hefty share of greenhouse gas emissions. All these trends were well under-way long before COVID-19.2020, which brought the pandemic, was a year of crisis. And the terrible loss and disruption experienced world-wide will continue in many places through this year and even beyond.

Increased poverty, food insecurity, malnutrition, and unemployment have pushed the Sustainable Development Goals further out of reach for many countries, and shone a harsh light on the disparities in our food systems. From these crises, however, have emerged many lessons. Foremost among them is that transforming our food systems is a matter of utmost urgency.2021 is a year of urgency but also of hope. Vaccines are being distributed, and the health and economic shocks of the pandemic have stimulated creativity and reforms in the private and public sectors.

The experience has sparked a willingness to think beyond traditional perspectives — economic, technological, and political. 2021 is also the year of global summits on food systems, climate, and nutrition. Together, this creates an unusual opportunity for the world to choose radical change.IFPRI is contributing evidence-based inputs for these critical global policy discussions and decisions, drawn from its large set of analytical tools, data, and regional coverage.

This year’s Global Food Policy Report examines what we have learned about the deficiencies in current food systems, the changes that are needed for system transfor-mation, and what COVID-19 has taught us. It offers lessons that can help put the world on the path to food system transformation for greater resilience, inclusion, efficiency, sustainability, and nutrition. IFPRI’s analytical work during the pandemic — conducted through both new initiatives and reconfigured ongoing research — illuminates the impacts of the crisis in numerous countries and considers how policy can best address such shocks while also help-ing to transform food systems for the future.

FOOD SYSTEMS AND ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATIONUnderinvestment in agriculture, together with an underappreciation of the crucial role of nature in sus-taining our food systems, has contributed to drastic deforestation as well as degradation of land and water systems that in turn affect agricultural productivity.4Some 27 percent of global forest loss from 2001 to 2015 can be attributed to land-use change for pro-duction of commodities such as soybeans, beef, and palm oil. Other culprits are forestry (26 percent), shift-ing agriculture (24 percent), and wildfires (23 percent).5The near disappearance of some of the world’s large rivers and freshwater lakes, such as the Aral Sea and Lake Chad, and the associated public health impacts have been linked to excessive irrigation development.6Heavy application of agrochemicals has contributed to the extinction of many insect species, jeopar-dizing the sustained provisioning of insect-based ecosystem services and threatening a progressive col-lapse of natural and human-dominated ecosystems alike.7 Injudicious use of synthetic pesticides, in par-ticular, is associated with biodiversity loss and human health impacts.8 Agriculture also contributes signifi-cantly to greenhouse gas emissions.9 While intensive, high-input farming that increases land productivity can degrade natural systems, low-input production sys-tems, such as those in large parts of Africa south of the Sahara, can lead to rapid conversion of remaining nat-ural habitats,10 including tropical forests, but achieve only low productivity levels, which are linked to food insecurity and civil strife.ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION AND SHOCKS
Among the consequences of habitat loss as agriculture expands is a growing risk of zoonotic and vector-borne diseases. Human incursion into forests and intensifica-tion of livestock production can prompt the crossover of pathogens from wildlife to livestock and people, facilitating the spread of zoonotic diseases such as Ebola, SARS, MERS, Lyme disease, and Rift Valley fever. Similarly, expansion of irrigation can increase risks of mosquito-borne diseases including malaria, zika, den-gue, and chikungunya. Agricultural drivers were likely associated with more than a quarter of all — and more than half of all zoonotic — infectious diseases that have emerged in humans since 1940.11 Thus, protecting environmental health is essential to protect human and animal health.12Degradation of ecosystems, together with climate change, threatens the productivity of our food sys-tems; it also causes shocks such as droughts and floods that, like the coronavirus pandemic, affect human livelihoods, health, and long-term options. The biodi-versity that underpins food production is disappearing owing to land use changes, pollution, and climate change.13 Wetlands, tropical forests, croplands, and grazing lands are particularly affected by degradation, increasing risks for food, nutrition, and water security. And climate change affects all these systems, adding another stressor to natural resources, including increas-ingly frequent natural disasters.This depletion of vital natural capital often affects the world’s poorest people most severely.14Land degradation alone already affects the wellbe-ing of 3.2 billion people.15 High poverty levels and dependence of livelihoods on unsustainable use of natural resources creates the conditions for a “pov-erty–environmental degradation” trap — a vicious cycle in which poverty leads to resource degradation, which leads to more poverty, increasing both human vul-nerability to natural hazards and the fragility of the ecosystems on which poor people depend