Could an ‘IPCC’ for food help the world address the issues?

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As the UN Food Systems Summit approaches, researchers point to the need for an institution with global reach.

As the United Nations Food Systems Summit approaches, researchers point to the need for an institution with global reach. The goal? To reduce the risk of food shortages in the world, fight against malnutrition, reduce food waste… A sort of “IPCC” of food, if you will.  

In 1988, the worrying increases in our greenhouse gas emissions prompted concern among scientific and political communities, which led to the development of an international group of experts responsible for monitoring climate change: the IPCC.

Created under the impetus of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme, the IPCC is now the most authoritative international institution in terms of climate, as demonstrated by the widespread media coverage of the publication of its sixth report last month. 

Four years after the birth of the IPCC, the emblematic “Rio Conference” took place, bringing together scientists and governments from all over the world and considerably strengthening the consensus and understanding of the seriousness of the global climate crisis.

The United Nations Food Systems Summit that opens on Thursday, September 23 in New York could be the opportunity to found an institution similar to the IPCC, but this time for food, according to researchers from the Alliance of Bioversity International (Italy) and the Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT, Colombia), who published an article in the journal Science. 

“Four billion people struggle to access sufficient, and healthy diets, contributing to a public global health crisis that endangers global health even more than the pandemic,”  note the authors. These researchers suggest that creating an international group on the scale of the IPCC could help. 

The idea would be to initially rely on existing organizations around the world, including the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE), attached to the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS).

“While many global organizations prioritize food system transformation, including One CGIAR and the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health, none have the authority to bring together 196 nations like the IPCC did to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the legally binding Paris Agreement of 2016,” notes Fabrice DeClerck, researcher at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, in press release. “The IPCC’s accomplishments have taken decades of drawn-out negotiations, and we don’t have this luxury for food if we are going to achieve 2030 goals,” he outlines. 

The researchers also stress the need not to limit themselves to the scientific sphere, but to include other disciplines in this “IPCC of food,” for example by integrating expertise in the fields of economics, social and behavioral sciences. 

“Food systems require urgent transformations to meet multiple demands of food and nutrition security…. These transformations require knowledge on the multiple dimensions of food systems (e.g., production, trade, consumption, culture, human and animal health, livelihoods and employment, food waste, and environmental sustainability), as well as a mechanism to translate these insights and analyses into governance processes,” argue the researchers.

Léa Drouelle