Green economy/alternative economic models | TableDebates

Photo of wheat stalks in the foreground with agricultural landscape in the background. Photo by Veronica White via UnSplash.

Tomorrow on the table: The politics and economics of food system transformation

In October 2024, TABLE brought together a diverse range of stakeholders across the food system with the aim of exploring how they envisaged a better food future, and what system transformations would be needed to get there. The participants included non-governmental and civil society organisations, policymakers, philanthropists, community leaders, and academics from diverse disciplines. Over the course of the workshop, they together discussed, developed and refined different visions for the future of the food system based on three initially conceived visions: market-led, state-led, and bottom-up. This report synthesises the workshop methods and dialogue process, the discussions participants had and the areas of agreement that emerged. https://www.doi.org/10.56661/421fa6df

A Research Agenda for Food Systems

A Research Agenda for Food Systems

This book outlines key issues currently facing the global food system, as well as responses to them, including corporate concentration, the planetary boundaries, food poverty, alternative proteins, urban food systems and circular food systems.

Untapped Opportunities: Climate Financing for Food Systems Transformation

Climate financing for food systems transformation

This report by the Global Alliance for the Future of Food argues that public climate finance should be directed into food system transformation because of the potential to deliver cost-effective co-benefits for climate mitigation, biodiversity, health and food system resilience. Currently, food systems receive only 3% of public climate finance despite producing one third of global emissions.

The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World

The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World

This book critiques three approaches to agriculture: Malthusian (expansion of agriculture), industrialisation (dependent on external inputs), and intensification (based on labour). It argues that the world can be fed with an alternative to industrial agriculture, which tends to be overlooked.

IPBES

IPBES reports: valuing nature & using wild species sustainably

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has released two reports. One offers insights and tools to support the more sustainable use of wild plants, animals, fungi and algae, arguing that the biodiversity crisis threatens the billions of people who benefit from the use of wild species for food, fuel or income. The other reports that there is a global focus on short-term profits and economic growth, meaning that market prices do not fully reflect the many ways in which nature is of value to people’s quality of life.

Tools to assess the sustainability of Food Hubs

Tools to assess the sustainability of Food Hubs

The Food Research Collaboration sets out the tools available to measure the sustainability of “sustainable food hubs” - initiatives that source food from producers and sell it to customers while upholding certain sustainability principles. The tools include Better Food Traders membership and accreditation, an evaluation framework developed by the New Economics Foundation, a framework by Shared Assets for assessing local economic resilience, a social impact toolkit developed by several organisations, and the Sustainable Food Trust’s Global Farm Metric.

Creative finance for food systems transformation

Creative finance for food systems transformation

This report by the Global Alliance for the Future of Food and Transformational Investing in Food Systems Initiative describes six case studies of food initiatives that have used unique investment strategies, such as a Mexican beekeeping cooperative that used loans from specialist agricultural and ethical banks that have lower interest rates than commercial banks. It also sets out five recommendations for how the investment community can support the transition to healthy, equitable food systems.

Food Research Collaboration

News and resources

Tim Lang's Field Notes: Finding hope in a food crisis

Professor Tim Lang reflects on the crises facing food systems locally, nationally and globally, including obesity and overweight, the Ukraine war, diet-related inequalities, declines in biodiversity, and volatile food prices. In this blog for the Food Research Collaboration, he points to reasons to be hopeful: that pressure is building on governments to produce coherent food policy; that the UK has an active movement of food researchers and NGOs; and that the belief that markets alone can resolve the food system’s challenges is growing weaker.

Image: RitaE, Carrots, Pixabay, Pixabay Licence

Journal articles

Degrowth plus efficiency for net zero food system by 2100

This paper models the impacts of a “degrowth” approach to reducing the environmental impacts of the global food system. It finds that reducing and redistributing income, alone, leads to only limited climate mitigation from food systems, because the shift towards unsustainable diets occurs at low income levels. Instead, a “sustainable transformation” scenario (incorporating income redistribution, and “efficiency-based” carbon tax, a shift towards the EAT-Lancet planetary health diet, and reduced food waste) is able to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions for the food system by 2100.