The Future of Food: Meeting Human Needs with Systemic Change

The final chapter of this book invites you to imagine and shape the food system to meet each population’s need for healthy diets, decent work, environmental sustainability and resilience. To improve outcomes we must anticipate the impacts of climate change and resource constraints, demographic shifts in age structure and location of population growth, and the opportunities created by innovation and new investment. Change occurs at every scale, from individual choices and local initiatives to national policies and international relations. A major challenge for the future of food is continued disparities in access to resources for production and earnings, as well as disparities in food environments, nutrition and health. Food can be a great unifier, with opportunities for households, organizations and governments to build community and achieve equitable growth, but food can also be used to divide and limit each community’s ability to achieve its full potential. The many different ways that people can obtain a healthy diet create options and ensure an ongoing need to anticipate how each choice might alter the future of food.