And out of date it is. To start with, our global food system is too expensive: nearly 3bn people cannot afford a healthy diet today. It is also fragile. Climate change and the pandemic are testing the system’s resilience, yet only 54 countries had food security strategies in place as of 2020. Crucially, our food system is simply not sustainable: we are currently breaking four of the nine planetary boundaries to provide insufficiently nutritious food to too few people. Clearly something must change.

Consumers will have a key role to play in two important areas: changing diets and reducing waste. With 77% of global agricultural land dedicated to livestock (feed included), moving towards a plant-based diets will be an important lever to help restore land, feed more people and reduce greenhouse gas emissions (a plant-based diet emits up to 50 times less than a meat-based one). Accelerating a dietary substitution at a time when meat production is expected to increase by 13% by 2030 will require both convincing and innovation to create attractive substitutes at price parity.

As for waste, 61% of the 931m tons wasted each year happens at the household level, making action at this level essential. This is something all countries will have to tackle, as household food-waste levels are relatively similar in high-income and in lower-middle-income countries, with a global average of 74kg per capita per year.

On the supply side, priorities will include building resilience and promoting the sustainable production of nutritious food. Innovation and technology deployment will be an important lever of action. Examples range from the very advanced – such as AI-powered genetic research to build heat resistant crops – to technologically simpler but no less important methods such as diversified farming, which can restore ecosystems, reduce inputs use and increase yield (see here for the latest global database of projects).

Companies will have to do their part too. As of 2020, nearly a quarter of the 350 most influential companies in the food sector had failed to commit to tackling the environmental, social or nutrition issues facing the global food system. Investors are starting to notice: in just five years, the FAIRR network, a coalition of investors engaging the food sector on ESG issues, has grown 40x to reach $40trn of assets under management in 2021.

Mobilizing all of the above actors, along with the more than 600m small farms that produce the world’s food, will require coherent food policies. Correcting the price signal will be an essential first step: the externalities of our food system currently cost the economy some $12trn per year, and are projected to grow to $16trn by 2050. By contrast, delivering a sustainable food system would cost $300-350bn per year and bring $4.5trn by 2030 in economic benefits.

What is clear is that the transformation of the food system will be anything but straightforward. As a recent OECD report rightfully articulates and documents, with so much at stake, success is more about political economy than it is about economics alone. The key, therefore, is to create a food transformation aligned with our values. Systemic change is never easy, but it’s the only way we can feed a growing population on a planet with finite resources.

Global Food Systems: Time for a Big Rethink