Delivering on food security and climate needs a strong international trading system
How can international trade play a role in addressing the joint challenges of food security and climate actions?
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted in 2015, aimed to eradicate hunger by 2030 (SDG 2). However, global food security has worsened since then.
In 2023, 733 million people were undernourished, and 2.8 billion people could not afford a healthy diet. Our agrifood systems are failing to nourish everyone and their true costs are underestimated.
Market, institutional, and policy failures have led to food prices that do not reflect the environmental, health, and livelihood impacts.
The hidden costs of agrifood systems were over 10% of global GDP in 2020, with health-related costs from unhealthy diets making up over 70%.
Climate extremes have intensified, adding pressure to agrifood systems. Identified as a main driver of food insecurity and malnutrition, climate extremes make sustainable food security and nutrition unattainable without climate action.
Agrifood systems are vulnerable to climate change and contribute over 30% of GHG emissions. The Paris Agreement cannot be achieved without reducing emissions from the agrifood sector.
Urgent action is needed to transform agrifood systems and address the interconnected crises of climate change, food security, and nutrition. This requires an integrated approach and international coordination.
The Roadmap for Achieving SDG 2 without breaching the 1.5°C threshold offers a framework to break silos across concepts, actors, and sectors.
It addresses dual coordination challenges: vertically across governance levels and horizontally across ministries and agencies.
The Just Transition principle is positioned as central to the transformation of agrifood systems, achieved through both improved efficiency and global rebalancing to make sure that no country, or individual is left behind.
Trade is essential for transforming agrifood systems and ensuring global food security. It allows efficient resource allocation and use of countries’ comparative advantages, increasing global welfare and food availability. Currently, most countries cannot supply themselves with a healthy diet, with 75% having deficiencies in at least four of the nine necessary food groups. Trade will become more important due to changes in food demand and supply.
Climate change will impact agriculture unevenly, altering countries’ comparative advantages. Trade will help mitigate welfare losses from climate change, which could increase by 30% if trade adjustments are prevented. Trade also enhances the resilience of agrifood systems, crucial for food security amid rising climate shocks.
But trade does not operate in an institutional vacuum. A functioning trade environment is vital. It must anticipate countries’ needs, provide cooperative solutions, and avoid unilateral policies that undermine trust and hinder ‘vertical’ coordination.
An open, rule-based global trading system is needed during the transition to transform agrifood systems, especially when supply and demand will evolve at different speeds in different locations.
International trade cooperation also solves specific problems: it helps move perishable food products faster, minimizing losses, and should establish common principles for measuring emissions, limiting trade barriers, and encouraging investment.
Reforming agricultural support, as outlined in the Policy Action Agenda for Transition to Sustainable Food and Agriculture during COP26, is essential. Total agricultural support was $541 billion in 2021 and should be repurposed to align agrifood systems with nutrition and climate objectives.
Trade in goods, services, technology, and proper intellectual property rights for agricultural technologies will reduce the productivity gap between high and low-income countries, alleviating poverty and increasing food availability.
Delivering this inclusive trade agenda requires addressing horizontal coordination at national and global levels. Ministries of trade, foreign affairs, agriculture, and environment must build common agendas. Breaking silos between international organizations is crucial.
The FAO and WTO’s Memorandum of Understanding during COP28 highlights the interlinkage of food security and nutrition, climate actions, and trade, emphasizing the need for joint success on these fronts to ensure good food for all, today and tomorrow.
