Vision Is Needed to Re-imagine A Broken Food System

“Reimagining the food system of the future means so much more than finding ways to ensure that supply meets demand,” says Sara Farley, Managing Director of The Rockefeller Foundation’s Food Initiative. 

“We need optimistic visions and actionable plans for a new global food systems paradigm that is circular and can equitably and nutritiously feed a population of 9 billion people by 2050.” 

Farley is one of the lead voices behind The Rockefeller Foundation’s Food System Vision Prize, a SecondMuse and OpenIDEO collaboration, that seeks to provide $2 million to ten global food systems visionaries (legally registered and organized entities, including companies, governments, cooperatives, communities, partnerships, NGOs, and universities) while providing them with the tools to create an organized movement with optimized visibility around their respective visions, in an accelerator format.

“How could the world look tomorrow?” asks Farley of the complexities that underpin the global food system, including “the environment, diets, economics, culture, technology and policy.”

“If we take no action on the current developmental issues, then we face a bleak future,” she says.

Given the upsurge in industrial farming and advances in science and technology, more food is being produced than ever before— but the processes that produce it are now responsible for destroying the very earth that is required for its growth. And even with the large amounts of food that are being produced, that which is produced is not equally accessible to everyone, while much of what is produced is wasted and never reaches anyone. For those who are lucky enough to have access to food, over reliance on inferior quality foods with limited nutritional content (due to poverty, climate change, overdependence on processed and imported foods, and a variety of other factors) results in overwhelming rates of obesity and non-communicable diseases. 

“Our food system is bankrupting our healthcare system,” says Farley.

These problems are symptomatic of a geographically complex paradigm of faulty inputs— production and consumption decisions surrounding food type and food quality, environmental conditions, distribution systems, food policies and social, political and economic systems (that often produce conflict, inequality and disempowerment within their populations).  These paradigms look very different across the thousands of interconnected food systems around the world. Traditional, scarcity based approaches only address the product or output of these systems— a systems-based approach is more likely to get to the root of the problem.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s Food System Vision Prize was conceived in recognition of the fact that despite the plethora of well-funded NGOs, strategists with sophisticated designations, economically and politically powerful networks and cutting-edge technologies— none of these has delivered a systemic solution to the global food crisis.

Here’s who might win this prize:

A team from an underrepresented group because oftentimes, the people who have the most progressive, unique and impactful solutions belong to marginalized populations with limited mobilizing power and access to resources.

Any legally registered or organized entity, of any size or background or location— with a unique and inspiring vision. This is not a competition for the organization with the most press coverage or political clout or the most expensive technology. 

A group from a Small Island Developing State that understands first-hand that the size of a global problem does not necessarily correlate with the size of the population that it affects, nor does the primary location of a problem always lie in the location with the largest population affected. Oftentimes the symptoms of a problem are felt the most in the most remote areas with the smallest most voiceless populations.  

The global food system problem is not a problem of quantity; it is a function of both quality and inequality and it is affecting everyone— the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless, in every region of the world— and just as everyone is affected, anyone can have the solution. 

“This prize is about empowerment,” says Farley. “We can help people from all around the world to become protagonists in their own future.” 

Open submissions for The Rockefeller Foundation’s Food System Vision Prize 2050 are being accepted from October 29, 2019 – January 31, 2020.