Agricultural technologies often fail to scale across regions, because adapting them to local conditions requires substantial, repeated, and often overlooked work. Based on 72 interviews with agri-tech founders, distributors, and farmers across diverse geographies, this paper identifies four recurring layers of regional adaptation: agronomic calibration, regulatory validation, service-system build-out, and cultural legitimacy work. These layers generate structured and path-dependent adaptation costs that are systematically underestimated and frequently duplicated.We introduce the concept of the liability of regionalization to describe this recurring cost structure. As public infrastructures for field trials, regulatory mediation, and service coordination have eroded or fragmented, firms reconstruct these functions independently, even in overlapping markets. While duplication is often seen as wasteful, we show that it also serves performative, protective, and risk-hedging functions under conditions of weak trust and institutional fragmentation.These dynamics reflect a governance gap: current innovation systems support entrepreneurial acceleration but lack mechanisms to convert private adaptation efforts into cumulative regional infrastructure. We argue for a policy mix that complements firm-level scaling instruments with shared validation platforms, interoperable learning systems, and co-governed adaptation institutions.Reframing regional adaptation as shared infrastructure rather than a firm-level hurdle highlights its role in shaping innovation efficiency, inclusion, and food-system resilience. Strengthening adaptation governance is essential for scaling technologies in ways that are both commercially viable and regionally inclusive.
Climate change poses systemic risks to food security, particularly in contexts of deep inequality. This study analyses how climate stressors interact with structural inequalities and governance to shape food security outcomes in Brazil. Using a convergent mixed-methods design — combining descriptive statistical analysis of closed-ended questionnaire items with thematic content analysis of open-ended responses, and integrating findings during interpretation — and drawing on 97 key informants with professional experience in food systems and related public policies, the findings suggest that climate change constitutes an important and interacting driver of food insecurity, operating through mechanisms of economic access, institutional fragmentation and structural inequality rather than through aggregate physical shortages of insecurity. Crucially, impacts manifest less through aggregate physical shortages than through disruptions in economic access, affordability, and price stability. Extreme events trigger supply chain instability that disproportionately burdens low-income populations and peripheral territories, revealing deep climate injustice. While community-based initiatives offer local resilience, findings show they are constrained by fragmented governance and insufficient public support. We argue that relying on local adaptation without state coordination risks reproducing inequality. The study concludes that effective adaptation requires integrated governance that links climate action with social protection. These insights from Brazil provide a critical framework for understanding climate-inequality nexuses in other Global South contexts.
Pacific Island Countries govern some of the world's most productive tuna fisheries, yet aggregate marine wealth does not guarantee equitable access to nutritious aquatic foods. This Perspective develops a framework for understanding that supply-access disconnect. We define connective infrastructure as the physical, digital, and organizational service systems that preserve, move, coordinate, and verify the circulation of aquatic foods between harvest and consumption. It develops a conceptual argument from published research and selected evidence relevant to different components of the framework: Kiribati's fiscal record, Tonga's 2022 compound infrastructure breakdown, and regional tuna statistics. Connective infrastructure mediates the conversion of marine resources into food access, with effects that depend on design, maintenance, and distribution. A political-economy perspective identifies how control over rights, finance, standards, expertise, and maintenance responsibilities shapes system design and effective access. Food policy should therefore pair production and conservation goals with maintainable logistics, proportionate information systems, and explicit distributional safeguards.
Agricultural systems are increasingly challenged by climatic instability, pest outbreaks, and pressure to reduce dependence on external inputs. However, agricultural evaluation systems remain strongly focused on productivity under optimal conditions, with less emphasis on resilience and adaptive capacity. One driver of this bias is the longstanding assumption that plant growth and defense are inherently antagonistic. Although plant biology now shows that growth and defense are dynamically coordinated rather than strictly competitive, this vision remains poorly integrated into agronomic evaluation and policy. In this Perspective we argue that persistent zero-sum interpretations of growth-defense relationships may constrain how resilience, stress tolerance, and sustainability are integrated into agricultural evaluation systems. Reframing growth-defense antagonism as a systems and policy problem may help align agricultural evaluation frameworks with the multifunctional demands imposed by climate change and sustainable food production.
Participatory research presents a promising way of working with Indigenous peoples, for whom food security is a priority, including in Canada, Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and the United States of America. Other reviews have explored how food security policies and programs have been used to improve food security. This review aims to systematically examine the use of participatory research to improve food security by examining research practice and outcomes at the socio-ecological levels. A systematic search of six databases from 1974 to June 2025 was conducted. Research practice elements were assessed using The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Quality Appraisal Tool, and other selected questions. Outcomes were categorised according to socioecological level and data analysed using narrative synthesis. Twenty-four studies from 36 articles were included, 12 studies from the United States of America, nine from Canada, and three from Australia. Most studies reported use of most research practice elements; all studies employed strengths-based approaches and Indigenous paradigms. However, most studies were unclear on the protection of ownership of intellectual and cultural property. Four studies reported outcomes at the policy level, all (24) studies at a community level and 11 at an organisational level. Thirteen articles reported outcomes across more than one level. Food security-related outcomes were broad, in line with community priorities. We encourage journals to strengthen requirements in reporting around the protection of intellectual and cultural property, and cultural and theoretical positioning, and we encourage translational research that documents and publishes policy-level actions.
Food loss and waste (FLW) account for a significant proportion of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and undermine global food security. However, the key factors contributing to FLW GHG emissions vary across different post-farming stages, posing a challenge to accurately project their emissions and identify effective entry points for climate change mitigation. To address this issue, we forecast whole-chain FLW GHG emissions with four FLW segments, including emissions from food loss (FLCS) and food waste (FWCS) in the supply chain, and those from food loss (FLCM) and food waste (FWCM) attributable to waste management, to minimize uncertainty caused by system-wide forecasting that ignores portion-specific trends and sensitivities. Our global FLW emission projections, using integrated Life Cycle Assessment - Regional Integrated model of Climate and the Economy, reveal that future FLW emissions show significant regional variability. Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to be the major contributor to global FLW emissions by 2050. Under the baseline scenario, FLW emissions are likely to increase the global temperature by 0.15 °C by 2050 compared to the 2006 level. Combined intervention scenario expects to mitigate 6.0 Gt CO2 equivalent emissions from global food systems, with its global warming potential at 0.11 °C by 2050. These findings underscore the impact of FLW emissions on climate change and provide strong support for regionally targeted interventions to reduce FLW.
Sustainably feeding an increasingly affluent global population remains a major challenge. Since the 1980s, China has implemented national agricultural programs, initially aimed at boosting yields and later expanding to improve resource use efficiency and sustainability. Using an ensemble machine learning framework, we quantified their impacts on crop yield and fertilizer use efficiency (FUE) from 1980 to 2020 while combining anthropogenic and natural factors. This approach explained about 80% of variation in crop yield and FUE. Over four decades, China's average crop yield doubled from 2.9 to 5.7 t ha−1, with 59% of the increase associated with these programs. Yield gains were initially linked to increased fertilizer inputs, which were accompanied by a decline in FUE, and over time, national programs coincided with the stabilization and improvement of FUE in most prefectures. These results highlight four decades of Chinese agricultural policy interventions from input-driven to efficiency-sustained yield growth, offering guidance for sustainable food security.
The current state of the food system necessitates transformation. However, food policies are typically borne out of siloed departments meaning that decision-makers do not consider the impacts of a given intervention across the entire food system. By viewing the implications across the wide range of food system outcomes in visual format, policy-makers will be better equipped to show any potential synergies (benefits) or trade-offs (unintended consequences) of the specific policy. A visual tool has been developed, the 'Food Co-Centre Sustainability Compass' based on a transdisciplinary multi-stakeholder participatory design approach. Active involvement of stakeholders from the supply chain, public sector, civil society and research communities achieved consensus on which outcomes must be considered specific to Irish and UK food system. Presenting these food systems areas of concern and relevant issues in a visual format facilitates a systems approach to decision-making for diverse range of food systems actors. While the Compass was developed primarily for the Irish and UK food system due to the scope of the project, it is fundamentally applicable in any geography.
Wheat plays a central role in global food security as one of the world's most widely cultivated crops and a primary source of human calories and protein, and meeting the future demand will require a nearly 60% increase in production by mid-century. Unlike maize or soybean, where private investment is supported by hybrid systems and strong value capture, wheat breeding remains disproportionately dependent on public-sector investment. This disparity reflects wheat's self-pollinating biology and weak seed-market appropriability, which limit privatesector incentives for sustained breeding investment. This article examines how institutional diversity across global wheat breeding systems has produced contrasting models of public, hybrid, and market-coordinated innovation with varying resilience, value capture, and technological capacity. Historical examples such as the development of 'Marquis' wheat illustrate how modest public investments generated transformative agronomic and economic gains, while North American breeding institutions also produced global germplasm impacts that shaped wheat improvement worldwide. Despite this legacy, the current situation of wheat breeding faces mounting challenges, including short-term competitive funding cycles misaligned with cultivar development timelines, increasing technological costs, slowing yield gains, breeder retirement, and erosion of institutional knowledge. Although genomics, phenomics, and rapid-generation technologies offer modernization opportunities, their practical utility and return on investment remain context dependent and resource intensive. To secure future gains, public wheat breeding must be reimagined as strategic innovation infrastructure supported by long-term patient-capital funding models, strengthened institutional frameworks, and deeper engagement across the wheat value chain.
Sub-Saharan Africa's persistent low-productivity trap reflects not only low input use but also the limited effectiveness of intensification strategies that expand fertilizer application without restoring the ecological, institutional, and market conditions required for sustained response. Increasing fertilizer use remains essential for closing nutrient deficits, but where soil organic carbon (SOC) is depleted, landscape functions are fragmented, and value chains fail to reward ecological investment, fertilizer alone cannot deliver durable productivity gains. The challenge is therefore not fertilizer versus agroecology, but how to combine mineral fertilizer with organic resource recapitalization, governed by conditional complementarity, and institutional conditions that make fertilizer responsive, efficient, and economically viable. This paper advances a causally explicit agroecological framework structured around four interacting pathways: nutrient-use efficiency, SOC recapitalization, multifunctional landscape governance, and producer-consumer reconnection, through which productivity, ecological function, and economic viability are jointly produced. These pathways operate simultaneously across scales, linking soil processes and ecosystem services to institutions and markets, with outcomes contingent on biomass availability, soil responsiveness, governance capacity, tenure security, and value-chain maturity. The framework is explicitly conditional. As with fertilizer intensification, SOC recapitalization is essential but not universally scalable; its effectiveness depends on directing high-quality biomass to farms where restoration needs, soil responsiveness, and fertilizer-use efficiency are greatest. Agroecological transition is thus understood not as the sequential adoption of practices, but as the coordinated activation of reinforcing ecological and institutional processes in which the judicious and complementary use of organic and inorganic inputs is central to system performance. The imperative, therefore shifts from scaling technologies to diagnosing the biophysical, institutional, and market conditions that determine where such coordinated processes are feasible, how localized gains can be consolidated, and under what conditions they can extend beyond their initial boundaries.
Rural diet quality remains poor, especially in remote areas where thin markets limit access to diverse, nutritious foods. Global debates on food systems transformation and nutrition-sensitive agriculture are increasingly interested in the conditions under which diversifying smallholder production leads to better diets and how this varies across market contexts. We examine this question using data from smallholder farming households in Nepal, juxtaposing the well-connected lowland plains (Terai) with remote mid-hill communities. We find that production diversity is modestly associated with dietary diversity on average, but this relationship is concentrated in the mid-hills and is stronger in more remote communities. In the Terai, no clear association is observed, and diets appear more closely related to purchasing power than to production diversity. Exploratory evidence shows that consumer-producer price gaps for rice are larger in the mid-hills, and rise with elevation, alongside higher consumption of own production, consistent with higher transaction costs and greater reliance on diversified own production in remote areas. The Nepal case suggests that diversification can improve diet quality in isolated rural systems with thin markets, while in more connected rural economies, strategies that enhance access to diverse, affordable foods through markets are likely to be more important for achieving food security and ending hunger.
Global food systems are failing to deliver adequate social, economic and environmental outcomes. These have been further impacted by major trends such as climate change, geopolitical fragmentation, and shocks such as COVID-19, global trade tariffs and regional conflicts. The nature of the poly-crisis facing food systems signifies future disruptions to come. In 2021, the UN Food Systems Summit called for food system transformation. Since then, many countries have struggled to advance beyond dialogue toward meaningful systemic change. We argue that insufficient emphasis on the transformation process has stalled progress. Transformation processes have been unable to generate alignment and momentum on desired food system futures, tackle power imbalances, overcome narrow focus on technological solutions, bridge food system disconnects. Leaders often overlook the necessity for adaptive, systemic responses suited to the complexity of food systems. Crucially, facilitative capacities to harness the collective wisdom and imagination of diverse stakeholders remain underutilised. We propose, based on literature, a diversity of foresight cases and experiences across four countries, a guiding framework for foresight for food systems transformation through which participatory foresight—integrating inclusive principles, systemic thinking, political economy awareness and evidence-based analysis—can contribute to seven key elements essential to food system transformation processes. This kind of participatory foresight fosters shared understanding among stakeholders, surfaces challenges and trade-offs, and opens up new avenues for systemic action. As looming disruptions threaten further instability, developing scenarios and unearthing dilemmas and existing power structures through participatory foresight can empower stakeholders to accelerate action toward resilient, equitable and nutritious food futures.
This article presents the author's perspective on the current state of the practice in food security assessments as seen from the point of view of scientific measurement, that is: quantitative assessments that are objective, valid and as reliable as necessary to correctly inform policy making. From this perspective, when measures are meant to reflect the severity of the condition suffered by households or individuals in a way that is comparable across populations and contexts, focusing on the food access dimension and constructing a measure using Rasch modelling is preferable to either a dashboard approach that gives the reader many different indicators without meaningful aggregation or guidance on choosing between different indicators, or a multidimensional index that combines indicators in a fixed and inevitably arbitrary manner. Rasch modelling provides a scientific, data-driven method to measure the severity of household or individual food insecurity and provides an invaluable contribution to informing social policies.
This systematic review identifies, maps, and synthesizes recommendations, lived experiences, and existing frameworks on the role of the formal food industry in addressing undernutrition and micronutrient deficiencies, with or without other coexisting forms of malnutrition, in low- and middle-income countries. We included 149 reports, identified through searches in three bibliographic databases, six grey literature repositories, two search engines, key institutions' websites, and expert consultations. About half of included reports (54% = 81) are grey literature. Most reports provide recommendations (59%) or potential good practice statements (64%), with fewer reports including lived experiences (14%), or existing frameworks (4%). The food industry in general, and food and non-alcoholic beverage manufacturers are the focus of reports, mostly referring to product formulation, product accessibility, and relationships with external organizations. Retailers are also targeted, particularly regarding product accessibility. We synthesized our findings into 28 recommendations for the food industry in general, and additional recommendations for specific industry sectors. Synthesized recommendations address matters of product (re-)formulation (reduction of nutrients of concern, increase of healthy ingredients, food fortification); nutrition labeling; marketing practices; availability, accessibility and affordability of healthy foods; multi-stakeholder processes; supply chain aspects (integration of farmers and women, nutrient preservation, food safety); and workforce nutrition/health. Most recommendations aim at mitigating the negative impact of industry practices on diets, while some aim at leveraging their positive impact. Research suggests that current practices often fall short of these recommendations. Multisectoral efforts, including binding regulation, are needed for broader implementation and maximizing the food industry's contribution to addressing undernutrition and micronutrient deficiencies. Since undernutrition and micronutrient deficiencies are core manifestations of food insecurity, effective implementation of these recommendations could also enhance global food security.
Climate change and conflict are increasingly shaping livelihoods in low- and middle-income countries, with agricultural households among the most directly affected. Yet, empirical evidence on how these stressors are associated with farmers' adaptation strategies and agricultural assets remains limited. Drawing on unique, largescale, nationally representative survey data from farming households in climate-vulnerable and conflict-affected Myanmar, we document broad-based recognition among farmers of significant shifts in weather patterns over the past six years. During this period, we observe a small increase - from a low base - in the adoption of climatesmart agricultural (CSA) practices, but sharper increases amongst larger, better-connected, and more productive farms. Additionally, climate-related risks - most notably droughts - and lagged conflict exposure are each strongly correlated with reduced agricultural land values, suggesting their strong linkages with this key farm asset. We also find that insecurity and weather changes, as well as the adoption of CSA practices, vary significantly across agroecological zones. The spatial heterogeneity in climate impacts, the adoption of CSA practices, and conflict exposure highlights the need for regionally differentiated adaptation strategies, with a focus on smallholders and remote households.
Geopolitical conflict in the Arabian Gulf carries profound implications for global food security that extend far beyond the immediate theatre of hostilities. The Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately 20% of global petroleum and one-fifth of liquefied natural gas trade transits daily, represents a critical chokepoint whose disruption simultaneously increases fertilizer costs, raises food processing and cold-chain operating costs, inflates maritime insurance premiums, triggers speculative commodity price spikes, erodes household purchasing power, and collapses physical and sociocultural food environments, particularly across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. This perspective examines the food security consequences of the U.S-Iran conflict through a food system lens, tracing disruption pathways across six interconnected dimensions: food production, processing, distribution, retail, consumption, and the food environment. In addition, a multi-level framework for action is presented, spanning household food reserves and nutrition literacy, national strategic grain stocks and social protection systems, and international institutional reforms including expanded commodity market monitoring, binding disciplines on food export restrictions, and pre-positioned humanitarian reserves. In conclusion, this perspective highlights the main vulnerabilities of the food system amid the U.S.-Iran war and provides stakeholders with a multi-level action plan to mitigate the deleterious effects of this conflict on food security.
Food systems face interlinked social-ecological challenges and so require urgent transformation. Innovation remains purported as the main approach to sustainability transformation, while less attention is given to exnovation, which represents the deliberate termination of unsustainable technologies, business models or systems. We use a food systems approach to investigate exnovation across supply chains focusing on G20 countries. Our results show that while exnovation is present in sustainability ambitions, it rarely translates into interventions. Most exnovation tackles environmental challenges rather than socio-economic and health issues. Exnovation interventions tend to rely on regulatory instruments, mainly target substances or products, and focus on production stages that shift the burden to farmers. Very few exnovation interventions included justice considerations. To promote (or reduce resistance to) change, we argue for greater shared responsibility across the supply chain. Overall, exnovation remains fragmented and unstructured: food system transformations could be strengthened with systemic exnovation.
