Agri4D times ten: food systems, development, and research in an era of rapid change

Next week, the 10th installment of the Agri4D conference will take place in Uppsala and online. The conference will welcome more than 400 researchers, politicians, and practitioners from different countries and continents. If you are not one of the 200+ participants to have the chance to join us in Uppsala, you can still register to follow some sessions online. The conference will offer up to 31 sessions and lectures about the development of sustainable food systems in low-income contexts.

Before we get swept up in such a variety of disciplines and topics, we look back at how the food systems and development landscape has changed throughout the years, expectations for the 10th Agri4D and what Agri4D might look like in the future. To help us are three pioneers of the conference who have been there for (almost) every single one of the conferences throughout the years and continues to support and engage with it. Even though the field has and continues to change – sometimes very rapidly – they all agree that it’s important to meet each other to share a variety of knowledges and look past our own silos to solve any present and future challenges for a world with zero hunger.

What are the most significant shifts in the role of agriculture and food systems in development policy and research?

In 2011 – right after the global finance crisis – food production was high on the political agenda due to increase in food prices. There was, however, very little discussion about resilience, food waste or nutrition. To address this, Global Committee on Food Security introduced a High Level Panel of Experts to guide global policy and debate on the basis of hard evidence and state of the art knowledge. Since then, a more holistic understanding of food security and nutrition has gained increasing prominence in the global debate.

The focus on production has later decreased with the realization that more than 30% of our food is wasted either on the consumption side or as post-harvest losses. The first FAO report authored by Swedish researchers, in fact, called for decreased waste across the value chain – producers to consumers. This raised awareness of the pressure that agricultural production has on natural resources.

Later on, as the understanding of resilience rose, so too did the role of social protection. Social security safety networks now include insurance for harvest losses and local procurement for school meals was introduced as a way to protect small-holders against shocks and crises.

Nutrition has been at the core of the Food Security and Nutrition agenda ever since, with the importance of nutritious food highlighted in the High Level Panel of Experts report on Nutrition and Food Systems in 2017.

More challenges remain. Food system insufficiencies – not providing enough nutritious food, persistent hunger, pressure on natural resources, and contribution to greenhouse gas emissions – led to the UN Secretary General calling for the Food System Summit in 2021. This shifted the focus to a more holistic, diverse, and resource efficient view of food systems – ones that include more social dimensions and are innovative in the face of new challenges.

What are the most pressing challenges currently facing efforts to build resilient, equitable food systems?

Conflicts and so-called man-made crises (such as tariffs) are today the most pressing issues for ensuring access to food and nutrition as well as food production (Ukraine being one example).

Agri4D has a lot to offer to help address these challenges. Knowledge sharing and innovation can contribute to more resilient and equitable food systems. We are especially pleased to see so many global contributions to our collective knowledge in Agri4D, helping us to better contextualize and understand current challenges.

What issues do you expect or hope Agri4D will be tackling in 2035?

I really hope that we could focus more on the sustainable development of food systems, rather than having to put out fires created by inequity and by man-made hunger crises. I hope that we will see an end to war and conflicts and that everyone will have access to affordable and nutritious food everywhere.

What are the most significant shifts in the role of agriculture and food systems in development policy and research?

I feel that, while fads, trends and buzzwords come and go, the fundamental need for science and the role of research in working towards more sustainable agriculture and food systems remains the same.

When I started with Agri4D in 2009 there was a feeling – in both Sweden and the UK – that agriculture was out-of-favour and something from the 1960s-80s and that there was a need to bring it back onto the policy-making agenda. I think this succeeded, and was further amplified by recent shocks: The Covid-19 pandemic, for example, and the resulting lockdowns highlighted the strong dependence of urban residents on rural food production, and revealed the global interconnectedness of value chains and food systems. The war in Ukraine compounded these insights in the way it affected wheat supply, and oil prices which in turn increased the price of many food products.

Despite these strong reminders of the need to keep sustainable agriculture and food production on top of the agenda, politicians already seem to be forgetting as new issues and geopolitics push agriculture again into the background.

What are the most pressing challenges currently facing efforts to build resilient, equitable food systems?

The issue of having to plan for increasingly extreme weather events. Planning and adaptation efforts are made even more complicated by the fact that the same place may experience opposing extremes depending on the season: droughts or extreme heat in summer, yet floods in spring or autumn. The changing ranges for crops, diseases, pathogens as a result of climatic change bring both new opportunities, as well as new challenges.

Another issue is the role of the ‘Big Food Companies’ that are driven by profit, rather than concerns for the health of people and planet. How can we ensure that social and environmental needs become embedded within their business models?

Then there is, of course, the issue of gender relations and the power imbalances in decision-making across the food system that is keeping us from building resilience and fairness across agriculture and nutrition.

What should Agri4D focus on in the future?

Agri4D’s focus going forward should be to work for solutions to these three pressing challenges: climate change mitigation and adaptation, corporate control of food systems focused on economic growth, and equity and justice within decision-making. Solutions may look different in different contexts – but that is why we need to meet each other, across disciplines and positionalities, to share knowledge and work for fair and sustainable solutions. This is something that the Agri4D conference facilitates.

What was the idea behind Agri4D?

Agri4D started as a network with two other Swedish research initiatives – Focali and SIANI. Its key activity was a conference and that’s the part that continues to this day with SIANI, SLU, and Sida organizing – not an easy task!

In the beginning, we had an African focus mainly because of the kind of contacts we had in our networks, but we tried to make it very open and inclusive to other parts of the world as well. We had a not-so-hidden intention of creating better cooperation between high profile international organizations such as International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), and The Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) who were all part of the network. It brought results: we had a few joint research and cooperation projects on forests, drylands, agriculture, as well as mapping the development landscape at the time.

What are the most significant shifts in the role of agriculture and food systems in development policy and research?

One major shift that happened over the last decade is the commercialization of land use. For a long time, we had the view of agriculture as something for sustenance and for feeding your own family, nothing more. Nowadays, even small-scale farmers are producing for the market. They became part of the economic system and that shift was not previously addressed by research.

Another prominent change is the insecurity and conflict around land use due to increased competition. Farmers are expanding into rangelands and forests, pastoralists are expanding into forests and being pushed out of conservation areas and so on.

Such conflicts are partly due to more climate insecurity and variability. Farmers can’t trust the seasons anymore and it has devastating consequences for their livelihoods. The main cause behind this change, however, is driven mostly by growing populations, bigger middle class, and the need to feed more people – especially in countries that experienced rapid economic development.

When it comes to research, I see a trend of shifting away from research on production and more focus instead on climate and biodiversity. The latter is a positive development, but it should not be in contrast to production side, but it’s competing for the same funding. This creates a false contradiction – these two disciplines need to work together if we were to achieve more sustainable production.

And, of course, perhaps the most obvious change is that there is much less research funding now, especially on the Swedish side.

How can Agri4D conference help address these issues?

Agri4D allows us to discuss concepts in agriculture on a broader level: what actually is resilience? What is sustainability? Is it preserving biodiversity as it was 50 years ago, or is it possible to combine it with actually feeding all the people living in the area? It is very useful to check if we’re all speaking the same language and to zoom out of our own small research boxes and contextualize our research on a societal level.

What are your expectations from this year’s Agri4D?

All of the issues raised in this year’s Agri4D are very pertinent and touch on a multitude of knowledges. In a rapidly changing society, that is what we need for greater preparedness: we need the kind of forward-looking knowledge that scientific research can produce, but also experiential, time-tested traditional knowledge. They are sometimes – wrongly, I think – portrayed as opposing, but they are very complementary and equally as necessary if we were to solve any future problems that may arise.

What issues do you expect or hope Agri4D will be tackling in 2035?

Hopefully, it will be “How did we achieve food security?”. We will be analyzing our successes and what we did right to get there.

However, the issues of resilience and sustainability on a system level would be, I’m afraid, still relevant to discuss. That’s a topic we need to revisit regularly to be able to see outside our own research boxes.

And I hope for a lot of that in Agri4D: sharing of successes and looking past our silos.