Agriculture encompasses crop and livestock production, aquaculture, and forestry for food and non-food products. Agriculture was a key factor in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people to live in the cities. While humans started gathering grains at least 105,000 years ago, nascent farmers only began planting them around 11,500 years ago. Sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle were domesticated around 10,000 years ago. Plants were independently cultivated in at least 11 regions of the world. In the 20th century, industrial agriculture based on large-scale monocultures came to dominate agricultural output.
Food security is the state of having reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food. The availability of food for people of any class and state, gender or religion is another element of food security. Similarly, household food security is considered to exist when all the members of a family, at all times, have access to enough food for an active, healthy life. Individuals who are food-secure do not live in hunger or fear of starvation. Food security includes resilience to future disruptions of food supply. Such a disruption could occur due to various risk factors such as droughts and floods, shipping disruptions, fuel shortages, economic instability, and wars. Food insecurity is the opposite of food security: a state where there is only limited or uncertain availability of suitable food.
Malnutrition occurs when an organism gets too few or too many nutrients, resulting in health problems. Specifically, it is a deficiency, excess, or imbalance of energy, protein and other nutrients which adversely affects the body's tissues and form.
CGIAR is a global partnership that unites international organizations engaged in research about food security. CGIAR research aims to reduce rural poverty, increase food security, improve human health and nutrition, and sustainable management of natural resources.
Environmental vegetarianism is the practice of vegetarianism that is motivated by the desire to create a sustainable diet, which avoids the negative environmental impact of meat production. Livestock as a whole is estimated to be responsible for around 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, significant reduction in meat consumption has been advocated by, among others, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in their 2019 special report and as part of the 2017 World Scientists' Warning to Humanity.
Stunted growth, also known as stunting or linear growth failure, is defined as impaired growth and development manifested by low height-for-age. It is a manifestation of malnutrition (undernutrition) and can be caused by endogenous factors or exogenous factors. Stunting is largely irreversible if occurring in the first 1000 days from conception to two years of age. The international definition of childhood stunting is a child who's height-for-age value is below -2 standard deviations from the median of the World Health Organization's (WHO) Child Growth Standards. Stunted growth is associated with poverty, maternal under-nutrition and poor health, frequent illness, and/or inappropriate feeding practices and care during the early years of life.
A sustainable food system is a type of food system that provides healthy food to people and creates sustainable environmental, economic, and social systems that surround food. Sustainable food systems start with the development of sustainable agricultural practices, development of more sustainable food distribution systems, creation of sustainable diets, and reduction of food waste throughout the system. Sustainable food systems have been argued to be central to many or all 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
The term food system describes the interconnected systems and processes that influence nutrition, food, health, community development, and agriculture. A food system includes all processes and infrastructure involved in feeding a population: growing, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting, marketing, consumption, distribution, and disposal of food and food-related items. It also includes the inputs needed and outputs generated at each of these steps.
The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) is an intergovernmental body within the United Nations System.
The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy is the graduate school of international affairs of Tufts University, in Medford, Massachusetts. Fletcher is one of America's oldest graduate schools of international relations. As of 2017, the student body numbered around 230, of whom 36 percent were international students from 70 countries, and around a quarter were U.S. minorities.
Lawrence James Haddad, is a British economist whose main research focuses on how to make food systems work better to advance the nutrition status of people globally.
Dariush Mozaffarian is a cardiologist, Jean Mayer Professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, Professor of Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine, and an attending physician at Tufts Medical Center. His work aims to create the science and translation for a food system that is nutritious, equitable, and sustainable. Dr. Mozaffarian has authored more than 500 scientific publications on dietary priorities for obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases, and on evidence-based policy approaches and innovations to reduce diet-related diseases and improve health equity in the US and globally. Some of his areas of interest include healthy diet patterns, nutritional biomarkers, Food is Medicine interventions in healthcare, nutrition innovation and entrepreneurship, and food policy. He is one of the top cited researchers in medicine globally, he has served in numerous advisory roles, and his work has been featured in an array of media outlets.
Soumya Swaminathan is an Indian paediatrician and clinical scientist known for her research on tuberculosis and HIV. From 2019 to 2022, she served as the chief scientist at the World Health Organization under the leadership of Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Previously, from October 2017 to March 2019, she was the Deputy Director General of Programmes (DDP) at the World Health Organization.
Lindiwe Sibanda Majele (born 1963) is a Zimbabwean professor, scientist, policy advocate and influencer on food systems. She currently serves as director and chair of the ARUA Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Food Systems (ARUA-SFS) at the University of Pretoria in Pretoria, South Africa as well as founder and managing director of Linds Agricultural Services Pvt Ltd. in Harare, Zimbabwe. She is currently a board member of Nestlé where she is also a member of the Sustainability Committee.
Barbara A. Burlingame is a nutrition scientist specializing in food composition, biodiversity for food and nutrition, sustainable diets and sustainable food systems, and traditional food systems of indigenous peoples. She is involved in nutrition policy development at the global level, and is currently a professor at Massey University.
The planetary health diet, also called a planetary diet or planetarian diet, is a flexitarian diet created by the EAT-Lancet commission as part of a report released in The Lancet on 16 January 2019. The aim of the report and the diet it developed is to create dietary paradigms that have the following aims:
Corinna Hawkes is a specialist in food systems. She is Director, Division of Food Systems and Food Safety for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Between 2016 and 2023 she was Director, Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London. She is also co-founder of the Next Gen(D)eration Leadership Collective.
Jessica Fanzo is an American scientist. She is a Professor of Climate and Director of the Food for Humanity Initiative at the Columbia Climate School. Prior to joining Columbia in July 2023, she was the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Global Food and Agriculture Policy and Ethics at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. She was the first laureate of the Carasso Foundation’s Sustainable Diets Prize in 2012 for her research on sustainable food and diets for long-term human health. In 2024, Fanzo was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Joachim von Braun is a German agricultural scientist and currently director of a department of the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn and President of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Delia Grace is an epidemiologist and a veterinarian. Grace joined the University of Greenwich in May 2020 as Professor of Food Safety Systems at the Natural Resources Institute. She is also Joint Appointed Scientist, Animal and Human Health Program at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Nairobi, Kenya.
