This report summarizes the corporate strategic foresight exercise conducted by FAO on the future of food and agriculture. It identifies key drivers that will shape agrifood systems, analyzes their interactions, and detects weak signals of potential challenges. Four scenarios are presented for 2030 and beyond: continuing on the current path leads to degradation, while achieving sustainability requires trading short-term gains for long-term resilience. The report highlights policy options focused on governance, consumer awareness, wealth distribution, and innovation to trigger transformations toward sustainability. While challenges are significant, the report maintains an optimistic view that collapse can be avoided through coordinated global action.

1. IFPRI – Washington DC, 01 February 2023
Seminar Co-organized by Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), IFPRI, and the CGIAR
Research Initiative on Foresight
Lorenzo Giovanni Bellù, Senior Economist, Lead Policy Intelligence Branch - Global
Perspectives, FAO UN – Rome
The future of food and agriculture
Drivers and triggers for transformation

2. The corporate strategic foresight process
This report illustrates the process and findings of the corporate strategic foresight exercise (CFSE).
Here are the essential steps of the CSFE process:
Mapping
agrifood systems
Identification of
agrifood systems’ drivers
Analysis of drivers’
interactions
Detection of
“weak signals”
Narratives of future scenarios
(snapshots and pathways)
Triggers and/or accelerators
for desired transformations
Strategies and policy options
for desired outcomes
Backward steps (iterative processes)
Sequential workflow
Main steps

3. FOFA DTT: Four alternative scenarios to 2030, 2050 and beyond
More of the same (MOS). Muddling through reactions to events and crises, while doing just
enough to avoid systemic collapses, led to degradation of agrifood systems sustainability and to
poor living conditions for a large number of people, thus increasing the long-run likelihood of
systemic failures.
Adjusted future (AFU). Some moves towards sustainable agrifood systems were triggered in an
attempt to achieve Agenda 2030 goals and some improvements in terms of well-being were
obtained, but the lack of overall sustainability and systemic resilience hampered their maintenance
in the long run.
Race to the bottom (RAB). Gravely ill-incentivized decisions led the world to the worst version of
itself after the collapse of substantial parts of socioeconomic, environmental and agrifood systems
with costly and almost irreversible consequences for a very large number of people and
ecosystems.
Trading off for sustainability (TOS). Awareness, education, social commitment, sense of
responsibility and participation triggered new power relationships, and shifted the development
paradigm in most countries. Gross domestic product (GDP) growth (and/or final consumption)
was traded off for inclusiveness, resilience and sustainability of agrifood, socioeconomic and
environmental systems.

4. Mapping agrifood systems: drivers, activities and outcomes
Socioeconomic systems’ drivers affect agrifood
systems both on the demand and supply sides.
Source: FAO. 2022. The future of food and agriculture – Drivers and triggers for transformation. Rome.
Agrifood systems’ activities are influenced by
selected drivers that largely depend on choices and
behaviours of agents within the agrifood systems
themselves.
Environmental systems frame both agrifood and
socioeconomic systems. Climate change, together
with the other environmental drivers, influence all
the drivers and are in turn influenced by them.
Agrifood systems’ outcomes depend on complex
relationships with socioeconomic and environmental
systems and co-determine, via systemic linkages and
feedback effects, the other systems.

5. Identification of drivers: what is new?
• Some drivers had already been identified and
analysed in previous FOFA works. In this report,
they have been updated/upgraded
• Given the changing circumstances and the proximity to 2030, The future of food
and agriculture – Drivers and triggers for transformation, this report, compared to
previous ones, puts more emphasis on aspects such as:
– cross-country interdependencies
– epidemics and degradation of ecosystems
– market concentration
– increasing food prices
– science and innovation
– capital and information intensification of agrifood production processes
– big data generation, control, and ownership
– uncertainties at all levels.

6. Selected drivers and ‘weak signals’: Economic growth (Driver 2)
Source: FAO UN, 2022. The future of food and agriculture – Drivers and triggers for transformation.
Historical trend:
Convergence between
HICs and LMICS in terms
of per capita income
remains highly
problematic’.
‘Weak signal’:
Convergence between
HICs and LMICS in terms
of per capita income may
not materialize at all in
the next decades (but see
China)
GDP per capita at purchasing power parity by region (1990–2020)

7. Structural transformation: agricultural GDP and employment
Historical trends:
The share of agricultural value
added with respect to the share
of employment in agriculture
exhibits different dynamics in
different regions. SSA reduced
share of employment but
increased value added.
‘Weak signal’: The traditional,
schoolbook type of transition
may not work (anymore) for
selected regions. A future of
structural unemployment
and/or strong migration of
former agricultural work
cannot be ruled out.
Share of agricultural value added in GDP and the share of agricultural
employment (1991–2019)

8. Outcomes and ‘weak signals’: Food security and nutrition
0
5
10
15
2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 2025 2030 2035 2040 2045 2050
Percentage
Historical Business as usual Towards sustainability Stratified societies
Base-year
for
projections
Sources: Scenario projections are based on FAO, 2018: The future of food and agriculture - Alternative pathways to 2050.
The base-year for projections is recalibrated as in FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, 2020: The state of food security and nutrition in the world.
Historical data from 2000 to 2019 are drawn from FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, 2020: The state of food security and nutrition in the world.
Historical data from 2020 to 2021 are drawn from FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, 2022: The state of food security and nutrition in the world.
Prevalence of undernourishment: Historical (2000-21) and
projected (2012-2050)
Historical and projected trends:
Some successes, signalled by nutrition
indicators have been achieved but the
PoU has increased in the last five years.
After a decade of successes, and is
moving along what was considered a
‘worst case’ scenario.
‘Weak signal’: Historical achievements
are not resilient and easily reversible.
Possible futures should comprise cases
of increasing food insecurity due to
lack of control over causes such as
climate change, conflicts and
inequalities.

9. Triggers of development, strategies and policies
The corporate FOFA-DTT report portrays and analyses four
“priority triggers” for transformation, identified by
FAO’s Corporate Strategic Foresight Exercise (CSFE),
and incorporated in FAO Strategic Framework 2022–31:
1) institutions and governance;
2) consumer awareness;
3) income and wealth distribution; and
4) innovative technologies and approaches
• With no pretention to be exhaustive, this FOFA report suggests strategic and policy options
that exploit (trigger) these triggers.
• Strategic and policy options may shift actual future across scenarios.

10. Highlighting trade-offs along development patterns
Win-win situations may be possible but in many instances conflicting objectives will have to be
addressed. A sustainable and resilient future leaving no one behind requires enduring some costs.
Selected conflicting objectives
Achieving sustainable yields (by internalizing
social and environmental costs)
Achieving food security and nutrition (improving
purchasing power of vulnerable people)
Increasing agrifood output Reducing agrifood GHG emissions
Achieving sustainable yields Minimizing land use expansion
Increasing employment Increasing wages
Innovating technologies Increasing employment
Increasing foreign exchange inflows from few
exports
Increasing economic diversification
Increasing food availability Using biomass as renewable energy
Funding social protection schemes Funding public infrastructure and R&D
Achieving food security Pursuing food safety

11. Strategic options and investment priorities to “trigger triggers”
Overarching: Invest in human capital for sound diagnoses and design of theories and
practices of change based on solid causal linkages between actions and expected
outcomes.
1. Governance: transforming voluntary guidelines into enforceable legislation. Set
trade rules and negotiating skills to protect virtuous countries adopting stricter
social and environmental rules;
2. Consumer awareness: supporting certifications and labelling for socially and
environmentally sustainable value chains. Preventing “social and green washing”.
3. Income and wealth distribution: Focusing on arrangements for retaining and
sharing value added. Tracking and stopping illicit financial flows (SDG 16.4);
4. Technologies and other innovating approaches. Support national and local R&D
that allow reducing leakages for profit expatriation, royalties, various costs relted to
import of ‘second hand’ obsolete technologies.

12. Overarching message of the FAO flagship report FOFA –DTT
It is still possible to avoid the collapse of agrifood, socio-economic and
environmental systems, provided that short-term unsustainable achievements
be traded off for longer-term sustainability and resilience.
Indeed, sustainable and resilient development does not run along a ‘toll-free
motorway’: wealthier countries and social groups that can afford the inevitable
costs of transformation should bear them to support to those already affected
by the negative impacts of unsustainable development.
In this endeavor, “…my mind is pessimistic, but my will is optimistic. Whatever
the situation, I imagine the worst that could happen in order to summon up all
my reserves and will power to overcome every obstacle.” (Antonio Gramsci,
Italian philosopher, 1927). Overall, pessimism is a luxury that we cannot afford.

13. The future of food and agriculture: stay tuned
Drivers and triggers for transformation
https://doi.org/10.4060/cc0959en
Dashboard
www.fao.org/global-perspectives-studies/fofa-dtt-
dashboard
FOFA series
www.fao.org/global-perspectives-studies/fofa