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The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has published a report measuring progress on achievement of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicators for food and agriculture.

I am particularly interested in SDG #2: Zero Hunger: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.

For example, for Indicator 2.1.1 for Target 2.1 (“By 2030, end hunger….”), the report says:

Updated global estimates point to some progress in decreasing world hunger in recent years. An estimated 8.2 percent of the global population may have faced hunger in 2024, down from 8.5 percent in 2023 and 8.7 percent in 2022. It is estimated that between 638 million and 720 million people faced hunger in 2024.

But the figures are considerably higher than they were in 2017, as shown here.

I also want to know what’s happening with chronic, noncommunicable diseases related to obesity.  For that, you have to go to the official UN progress report on the SDGs.

Target 3.4 41. Globally, in 2021, it is estimated that 18 million people under the age of 70 died from a noncommunicable disease. This figure represents more than half of deaths among people in this age range. The risk of premature death from any of the four main noncommunicable diseases (cardiovascular diseases, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases and diabetes) has decreased since 2015, but, despite increased awareness, the world is not on track to meet the target for the reduction of noncommunicable diseases by 2030.

Comment: Public health has a lot of work to do.  The SDGs were a great idea (with terrific iconography) but the 2030 deadline is fast approaching with attainment of most goals still well out of reach.  That is one reason why the destruction of the public health apparatus in the United States is so alarming, and the withdrawal of US support for international public health so deeply disappointing.

Reports about one or another aspect of food systems are issued constantly and are hard to keep up with.  Here are links to two major sources.

I.  The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems.

This group produces impressive food-system reports at regular intervals.

Its most recent is Fuel to Fork: What will it take to get fossil fuels out of our food systems?

Our food system is hooked on fossil fuels. From fossil-fuelled fertilizers and pesticides to plastic packaging, ultra-processed foods, and long-haul cold chains, fossil fuels are entwined at every link in the food chain. Food systems now consume 40% of all petrochemicals and 15% of fossil fuels globally – making them a key growth frontier for Big Oil. Yet food remains glaringly absent from the climate conversation…This report sets out what it will take to break that addiction – and why it must start now.

II.  FAO Committee on World Food Security, High Level Panel of Experts  

This group produces reports aimed at faciliating policy debates and policy making.  Its most recent is Building Resilient Food Systems (September 2025)

This report addresses the urgent need to enhance food system resilience amidst escalating environmental, political and economic challenges. It provides focused and action-oriented policy recommendations to build resilient food systems capable of withstanding shocks and stresses…The report highlights the need to shift…to approaches aimed at “bouncing forward” by means of transformative changes that address structural and systemic vulnerabilities…In sum, the report calls for immediate and sustained action to build food system resilience and ensure the right to food for all and the well-being of the planet for future generations.

My former NYU colleague, Corinna Hawkes, who now directs the Agrifood Systems and Food Safety Division at FAO in Rome, sent a link to its new publication, Transforming Food and Agriculture through a Systems Approach.

This publication provides an organizing framework for applying a systems approach to the transformation of food and agriculture. Building on evidence from systems science and practical real-world examples from countries, it identifies six core elements of a systems approach and specifies key practices and shifts needed to implement in practice. It includes examples from across the world of how systems-based practices are already being taken forward at different scales.

This publication is about food systems, why they matter, and how to use a food systems approach to improve food quality and access.

It is beautifully illustrated.  The definition:

And here’s how it works.

There is much more in this report.  I view it as a how-to manual. Use it!

Resources

• Download the publication: https://doi.org/10.4060/cd6071en
• Dr. Hawkes’ Tweet and Post about the report
• Register for briefing sessions: 12 September (11-12 CEST) or 15 September (15-16 CEST)

Here’s the announcement:

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) today launched its 2024 Statistical Yearbook, offering an in-depth overview of the most significant trends shaping global agrifood systems. This year’s edition highlights critical challenges, including increased temperatures over land, the ongoing global struggle with food insecurity alongside increasing obesity rates, and the environmental pressures faced by agricultural production….

The 2024 Statistical Yearbook is also available in a digital, interactive format and comes with a companion pocketbook, offering a clear reference to key data on agriculture, food security, and sustainability. It is part of FAO’s ongoing effort to improve data accessibility, complementing the FAOSTAT platform, which hosts the world’s largest collection of free agricultural statistics, covering over 245 countries and territories.

It’s got great graphics.  One example:

A few highlights:

• The value of global agriculture: $3.8 trillion in 2022.
• Proportion of global workforce employed in agriculture: a decrease from 40% in 2000 to 26% in 2022.
• Hunger remains persistent: In 2023, between 713 and 757 million people were undernourished, 152 million more people than in 2019.  Most are in Asia and Africa.
• Obesity is rising: More than 25% of adults in the Americas, Europe and Oceania are obese.
• Meat production increased by 55% from 2000 to 2022, with chicken accounting for the largest share of this rise. 
• Pesticides increased by 70% between 2000 and 2022, with the Americas accounting for half global pesticide use.
• Vegetable oils grew by 133 percent between 2000 and 2021, largely driven by an increase in palm oil production.
• Greenhouse gas emissions from agrifood systems rose 10% between 2000 and 2022, with livestock contributing to around 54% of farmgate emissions.
• Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are withdrawing each year 9 to almost 40 times their renewable freshwater resources available.

Comment: Food systems need immediate transformation to become healthier and more sustainable. 

What are healthy diets? Joint statement by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Health Organization

What this is about:

Healthy diets promote health, growth and development, support active lifestyles, prevent nutrient deficiencies and excesses, communicable and noncommunicable diseases, foodborne diseases and promote wellbeing. The exact make-up of a diet will vary depending on individual characteristics, preferences and beliefs, cultural context, locally available foods and dietary customs. However, the basic principles of what constitutes healthy diets remain the same.

The guiding principles: Adequate, Balanced, Moderate, Diverse.

Here’s what they mean by Balance:

The actual guidelines are discussed under the Moderate principle.

• Sodium: restrict to 2 grams/d (5 g table salt)
• Sugars: restrict to 10% or less of daily calories.
• Saturated fat: restrict to 10% of calories, with no more than 1% from trans fat

FAO and WHO duck making a clear statement about the next two issues, although their implications are clear.

• Red and processed meat: even low levels may have negative health consequences
• Ultra-processed foods: these have negative health consequences

I wish they had stated these recommendations more clearly.  Yes they are controversial with big industries lobbying against any suggestion to eat less of these foods, but these agencies, or at least WHO, should put public health first.

I recognize that these agencies have constituencies of nearly 200 countries, many with strong meat and ultra-processed food industries.  I also recognize that the agencies have no power other than leadership to get any of those countries to do anything.

They at least stated what they thought.  It’s up to country governments to take action.  I hope they do.

It’s a slow-news holiday week so I’m going to use it to catch up on reports.  The first:

FAO: The State of Food and Agriculture 2024: Value-Driven Transformation of Agrifood Systems

FAO uses true cost accounting (TCA) to analyze global food systems.

• ➔ By improving on the hidden costs quantified in The State of Food and Agriculture 2023, this report unpacks the health hidden costs associated with unhealthy dietary patterns linked to an increased risk of non-communicable diseases (NCDs).
• ➔ Case studies show how targeted TCA assessments conducted across multiple agrifood systems categories provide more nuanced insights into the requisite agrifood systems transformation and potential actions moving forward.

Here is an example of the kinds of analyses presented here.

And here are the resources:

• Read the full digital report
• Read the In Brief
• Read the interactive story: Beyond the price tag
• Watch the video: State of Food and Agriculture 2024. Value-driven transformation of agrifood systems
• Read the press release: Unhealthy dietary patterns drive $8 trillion in annual hidden costs of global agrifood systems
• Read The State of Food and Agriculture 2023

Read the background papers:

• Navigating the distributional challenges of agrifood systems transformation
• The hidden costs of coffee production in the Eastern African value chains
• A typology for agrifood systems
• Potential of crop diversification to address the hidden costs of major crop value chains in Central Asia
• Refining national true cost accounting for agrifood systems
• Hidden costs of agrifood systems
• How to reduce agrifood systems’ future hidden costs? A multi-country case study

The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is taking the lead on bringing dietary guidelines into the 21st Century.

It is calling for national dietary guidelines not only to be nutrient-based and food-based, but food systems-based.

Food systems-based guidelines extend beyond food-based guidelines that “provide advice on foods, food groups and dietary patterns to provide the required nutrients to the general public to promote overall health and prevent chronic diseases.”

Food system-based guidelines not only address health and nutritional priorities but also consider sociocultural, economic, and environmental sustainability factors.  This means

context-specific multilevel recommendations that enable governments to outline what constitutes a healthy diet from sustainable food systems, align food-related policies and programmes and support the population to adopt healthier and more sustainable dietary patterns and practices that favour, among other outcomes, environmental sustainability and socio-economic equity.

This is a huge advance.  It means that sustainability issues are essential components of dietary advice.

From now on, dietary guidelines that do not consider sustainability are out of date.

Note: By order of Congress, the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines did not consider sustainability in its meat recommendations and sustainability was off the table for the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines and also for the 2025-2030 version now underway.  This means the new guidelines issues in 2025 will be dated and largely irrelevant to the modern era.

Unless the Advisory Committee gets to work.  I hope it does.

I received an e-mailed news release from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) about its latest report.

The press release headline: Hidden costs of global agrifood systems worth at least $10 trillion.  154-country study makes case for true cost accounting to guide policy.

Our current agrifood systems impose huge hidden costs on our health, the environment and society, equivalent to at least $10 trillion a year, according to a ground-breaking analysis by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), covering 154 countries. This represents almost 10 percent of global GDP.

According to the 2023 edition of The State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA), the biggest hidden costs (more than 70 percent) are driven by unhealthy diets, high in ultra-processed foods, fats and sugars, leading to obesity and non-communicable diseases, and causing labour productivity losses. Such losses are particularly high in high- and upper-middle-income countries.

This report, FAO says, presents initial cost estimates.  A report next year will focus on ways to mitigate these costs.  Governments, it says, “can pull different levers to adjust agrifood systems and drive better outcomes overall. Taxes, subsidies, legislation and regulation are among them.”

The FAO director says: “the future of our agrifood systems hinges on our willingness to appreciate all food producers, big or small, to acknowledge these true costs, and understand how we all contribute to them, and what actions we need to take. ”

The report urges governments to use true cost accounting to address the climate crisis, poverty, inequality and food security.

True cost accounting (TCA), according to the report is:

A holistic and systemic approach to measuring and valuing the environmental, social, health and economic costs and benefits generated by agrifood systems to facilitate improved decisions by policymakers, businesses, farmers, investors and consumers.43

Translated, this means trying to assign numbers to the externalized and hidden costs of food production and consumption, meaning not just what you pay at the cash register but also the costs you pay in other ways for health care, animal welfare, biodiversity, polluted water and soil, and climate change.

These, says this report, add up to about $12.7 trillion a year.

The idea is to get food producers to pay their fair share of these costs—issues of accounting and accountability (according to the Scientific Group of the UN Food Systems Summit). 

The report comes with a big collection of resources:

• Read the full digital report
• Read the In Brief
• Read the Interactive story: Beyond the price tag
• Watch the Video: State of Food and Agriculture 2023. Revealing the true cost of food to transform agrifood systems
• Read the press release: Hidden costs of global agrifood systems worth at least $10 trillion

Read the background papers:

• Hidden costs of agrifood systems and recent trends from 2016 to 2023
• Revealing the hidden costs of agrifood systems to enhance their value
• Accounting for the hidden costs of agrifood systems in data-scarce contexts
• The role of true cost accounting in guiding agrifood businesses and investments towards sustainability
• True cost accounting applications for agrifood systems policymakers

That should be plenty to keep us all busy for quite a while.  Enjoy and ponder.