One of the great human achievements over the last half century is that advances in food production have largely kept pace with demand on a global basis. Today, around 7 billion people are not hungry, up from about 3 billion 50 years ago. But we should not be complacent: despite these successes, over 800 million people are still hungry, perhaps 3 billion more lack sufficient nutrients, and at least 2.5 billion people consume excess calories for their physiological needs. Stunting and wasting due to insufficient nutrients and calories, and especially in early years, have lasting impacts on an individual’s potential. There are also significant, and growing, impacts of our food system on the climate and natural resource base upon which our food security ultimately depends.

The 30 minute presentation will introduce how adopting a food systems approach helps to identify how and where the food system is a driver of global change. This draws on an understanding of the wide range of food system activities from consuming food through to primary production (a ‘fork-to-farm’ approach), the actors involved, and the drivers that influence their decisions. In addition to considering the consequences of these activities on the range of environmental and socioeconomic outcomes, the presentation will highlight how, in turn, these outcomes need to be better balanced given the inherent trade-offs within the ‘diets-health-climate’ discourse. This will be considered against the need to better manage – i.e., not just continuing to strive to meet – food demand. To this end, the presentation will also unpack the notion of ‘food system transformation’, the respective roles that food system actors and public and private policy makers need to play, and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

Summary Bio:
Dr John Ingram (www.eci.ox.ac.uk/person/dr-john-ingram) is an Associate Professor and a Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College, University of Oxford, and Associate Professors at Stellenbosch University, South Africa and the University of Birmingham, UK. His interests are in the conceptual framing of food systems; the interactions among the many food system actors and their varied activities, and the outcomes of their activities for nutrition and other aspects of food security, livelihoods, enterprise and business, and environment; scenario analysis; and food system resilience. Having established the Food Systems Transformation Research Group within Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, he led the multi-university post-graduate ‘Interdisciplinary Food Systems Teaching and Learning’ (IFSTAL) and the TUKFS BeanMeals programmes, and co-leads the Foresight4Food (F4F) and Food System Impact Valuation (FoodSIVI) programmes, and a number of Eu-Horizon projects. He also coordinated the Global Food Security 2016-2021 £15m programme ‘Resilience of the UK Food System’.