Marie-Hélène Schwoob, Peter Timmer, Martin Andersson, and Sébastien Treyer wrote Chapter 12 of the book Agriculture & Food Systems to 2050 Global Trends, Challenges and Opportunities published within the World Scientific Series in Grand Public Policy Challenges of the 21st Century.
Chapter's introduction [extract]
Achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) conjointly is generally presented as a transformation agenda. 1 Although the notion of transformation is not explicitly defined in official texts, it is associated with profound changes in social and economic systems and presented as a necessary process if the ambition is to achieve the economic, social, and environmental objectives. Food and agriculture systems are at the heart of this challenging transformation, and changes in these systems impact nearly all of the SDGs (ICSU, 2017). Yet many pieces of the foresight literature concur that current trends in food and agriculture systems are incompatible with the conjoint achievement of economic, social, and environmental objectives (Godfray et al., 2010; Paillard et al., 2011; IAASTD, 2009). Although these foresight studies propose various elements for assessing the performance of sustainable or agroecological intensification options, they lack consensus on the nature and magnitude of the transformations of food and agriculture systems that would be needed to achieve the SDGs. Missing in their analysis are the tansformation pathways that can shift these systems from their current state toward a future sustainable state.
