Inclusive science must follow the UN Food Systems Summit

If we are to have a chance of ridding the world of hunger and malnutrition, Summit leaders must return to a participatory science model. World leaders gathered in New York on September 23 for the United Nations Food Systems Summit to address this crisis and make commitments leading to meaningful progress on ending hunger by 2030, one of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development goals. New approaches to addressing hunger have emerged in recent decades that move beyond this “productionist” approach and seek to address the multiple dimensions of malnutrition, including poor or unstable food distribution and trade, limited access to healthy food, a lack of water and sanitation facilities needed for food preparation, unsustainable farming practices, and people’s limited control over their food options. This process has brought forward new ways of thinking about global hunger, including the food systems thinking that is central to the UN Food Systems Summit. While the existing CFS-HLPE science policy interface could certainly be enhanced, and those within and outside this group have made suggestions for improvements, creating a new mechanism would waste valuable time in the fight against global hunger, be less participatory, and create an unnecessarily fractured global food security apparatus.