Résumé
Transforming food systems is essential to bring about a healthier, equitable,
sustainable, and resilient future, including achieving global development and
sustainability goals. To date, no comprehensive framework exists to track food
systems transformation and their contributions to global goals. In 2021, the
Food Systems Countdown to 2030 Initiative (FSCI) articulated an architecture to
monitor food systems across five themes: 1 diets, nutrition, and health; 2
environment, natural resources, and production; 3 livelihoods, poverty, and
equity; 4 governance; and 5 resilience and sustainability. Each theme comprises
three-to-five indicator domains. This paper builds on that architecture,
presenting the inclusive, consultative process used to select indicators and an
application of the indicator framework using the latest available data,
constructing the first global food systems baseline to track transformation.
While data are available to cover most themes and domains, critical indicator
gaps exist such as off-farm livelihoods, food loss and waste, and governance.
Baseline results demonstrate every region or country can claim positive
outcomes in some parts of food systems, but none are optimal across all
domains, and some indicators are independent of national income. These results
underscore the need for dedicated monitoring and transformation agendas
specific to food systems. Tracking these indicators to 2030 and beyond will
allow for data-driven food systems governance at all scales and increase
accountability for urgently needed progress toward achieving global goals.