TABLE 1.
Prevailing narrative | New narrative |
---|---|
“We” feed the world, often driven by the Global North. | The world feeds itself: citizens and communities grow their foods with dignity, retaining rights to their products and access to markets. |
Food is seen as a commodity. | Healthy and sustainable diets are seen as a public good with farmers, producers, citizens, and health care professionals supported and incentivized to promote health. In addition, local and regional food systems and resilience are prioritized. |
Policy addresses hunger in isolation. | Hunger is addressed with a healthy, nutrient-dense diet–centered approach that addresses malnutrition in all its forms (hunger, obesity, micronutrient deficiencies). |
Unhealthy, unsustainable, culturally inappropriate food choices are an unavoidable by-product of prevailing food environments, economics, and what people want to eat. | Food environments enable and motivate people to eat a diversity of foods in healthy proportions, sustainably, and in culturally respectful ways. |
Systems and practices treat ill-health and take a curative approach to health care provisions on diet-related health problems. | Conditions promote good health and a preventative approach to health care provisions, and there is a focus on preventing diet-related diseases through healthier consumption patterns. |
The responsibility falls on the individual, with little focus on addressing food environments and underlying determinants of health. | Focus is on health and sustainable diets as a public good, healthy food environments, and underlying determinants of health with all food systems actors striving to make a positive contribution. |
Emphasis is on a global search for single solutions. | A diversity of contexts requires a diversity of solutions with multiple food systems entry points aligned by a shared food systems vision. |
LMICs should not be burdened with climate mitigation when hunger is still a huge priority. | All countries must contribute to climate mitigation; otherwise, we will not meet the Paris targets, and climate change's devastation will make LMIC settings worse with a limited resource base for coping strategies. |
1LMIC, low- and middle-income country.