In late September 2021 the UN convened the world's first global Food Systems Summit to ‘awaken the world to the fact that we all must work together to transform the way the world produces, consumes and thinks about food’ (UN, 2021). It took place in the context of the COVID pandemic which contributed to a truly shocking parallel ‘hunger pandemic’ threatening 270 m people with starvation in 2021 alone (Beasley, 2021). However, the Covid pandemic merely amplified many of the underlying structural problems of an already ‘bro-ken global food system’ (McMichael, 2021). One which, some estimates suggest, routinely fails to deliver effective food security for some 2.37 billion people (Clapp, 2022). Accordingly, UN Secretary General António Guterres instructed the very first UN Food Systems Summit (FSS) to ‘launch bold new actions, solutions and strategies to deliver progress on ... healthier, more sustainable, and more equitable food systems’ to radically transform global food security in order to deliver on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 2: abolishing hunger by 2030 (UN, 2021).
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