Project duration: 2016-2020
Studies of the futures of food answer questions such as “do we need to increase global agricultural production to feed the world sustainably in 2050?” Conclusions vary dramatically: while some maintain we do not need to increase production at all, others claim we need to increase it by 60-110%. Similar variations and uncertainties are striking with respect to many other dimensions of food systems. Discrepancies among studies on thematic focus, indicators, and data sources are also consequential. The sheer heterogeneity of methods used to explore the futures of food undermines meaningful comparisons between studies. These issues and many others compromise responsible and informed collective choices vital for humanity, the wellbeing of nonhuman animals, and our impact on Earth systems. In short, disagreements on what policies and social actions we should adopt to shape the future of food depend on how we assess the evolution of food systems over the long-term (at least 20 years into the future).
“Futures studies,” “foresight,” or “prospective” apply scientific rigor, artful skill, and practical imagination to predict, forecast, anticipate, control, shape, or create possible futures of food that are relevant to present-day choices. Building on foresight practitioners’ rich tradition of reflection on their own work, our interdisciplinary team from Johns Hopkins University/the University of Twente, IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria) and Wageningen University and Research has initiated a project that engages with ethical, political, governance, and epistemic assumptions underlying global food futures studies. Its innovative and systematic approach borrows tools from philosophy, futures studies, STS, economics, and social sciences to shed light on global food futures studies. The project is articulated around three work packages:
FoodFutures: A Systematic Review of Global Food Security and Nutrition Model Studies (Leader Michiel van Dijk)
The Plausibility of a Food Sovereignty Future (Leader: Yashar Saghai)
Global Food System Governance in Food Futures Studies (Leader: Otto Hospes)
Output:
- Publicly available database:
- Academic publications:
van Dijk, Michiel, Tom Morley, Marie Luise Rau, Saghai Yashar. 2021. "A meta-analysis of global food demand and population at risk of hunger projections for the period 2010-2050." Nature Food 2(494–501). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00322-9.
Saghai, Y. 2021. "Subversive future seeks like-minded model: On the mMismatch between visions of food sovereignty futures and quantified scenarios of global food futures." Ethics and International Affairs: 51-67.
Saghai, Y. 2021 "Is a Thriving Food Sovereignty-Based Global Future Plausible?," in Justice and Food Security in a Changing Climate, edited by Hanna Schübel and Ivo Wallimann-Helmer. Wagenignen Academic Publishers, Wageningen, Netherlands.
van Dijk, Michiel, Yashar Saghai, Marie-Luise Ra, and Tom Morley. 2020. “Global food demand projections: A review.” In Choose Food: An Ethical Basis for Food Production, edited by Alan Goldberg: 98-124. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Saghai, Yashar, Michiel van Dijk, Tomas Morley and Marie-Luise Rau. 2018. “Questioning long-term global food futures studies: A systematic, empirical, and normative approach.” In Professionals in Food Chains: Ethics, Roles and Responsibilities, edited by Herwig Grimm and Svenja Springer. Wagenignen Academic Publishers, Wageningen, Netherlands.
- Conference presentations:
“Questioning Long-Term Global Food Futures Studies: A Systematic, Empirical, and Normative Approach.” 14th Congress of the European Society for Agricultural and Food Ethics (EurSafe 2018), Vienna, Austria, June 16, 2018.
“How do We Get from Now to Then? On the Merits and Limits of Explanatory Pluralism in Future Scenarios.” “Grappling with the Futures: Insights from Philosophy, History, and Science, Technology and Society” Symposium. Harvard University, April 29, 2018.
"Ethics and Global Food Futures: Mapping the Terrain." Invited speaker, Stanley N. Gershoff Symposium (Theme: "Next Generation Food Production"), Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University, March 31, 2017. Video available here: https://vimeo.com/groups/461677/videos/213224349.
Team:
Yashar Saghai, Ph.D. (Principal Investigator): Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Twente (Netherlands) and Senior Scholar at The Millennium Project: Global Futures Research and Studies, Washington, D.C. Previously, researcher at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.
Otto Hospes, Ph.D., (Team Leader) is an Associate Professor of Public-Private Governance of Food in the Public Administration and Policy Group, Department of Social Sciences at Wageningen University. Dr Hospes holds a Ph.D. in sociology and is a legal pluralist studying how state and non-state legal orders affect governance of food and agriculture. He investigates conflicts and collaboration between private actors and public authorities in governing food systems and global value chains; tensions between global-scale and national-scale governance; the evaluation of multi-stakeholder governance, food sovereignty; the governance of biofuels in Brazil, wicked problems within food systems; and the governance of the right to food and its implementation in the Netherlands. He has participated in a number of projects, including Next Generation Governance Arrangements for Sustainable Global Value Chains.
Michiel van Dijk, Ph.D. (Team Leader), is a Senior Researcher in the international policy department at Wageningen Economic Research in the Hague, and a guest research scholar at IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria). Dr. van Dijk is part of the Ecosystems Services and Management Program. He works on the Integrated Solutions for Water, Energy, and Land (IS-WEL) project to assess the food-energy-water nexus at global and sub-regional levels using a combination of models. He also contributes to the development of the GLOBIOM model by integrating and linking micro-level survey data. At Wageningen, Dr. van Dijk led the work package to develop scenarios for the modelling of global food and nutrition security futures as part of the FOODSECURE project, and has co-authored a review of studies on this topic. He contributes to the development of MAGNET, the Wageningen Economic Research in-house global economic simulation model.
Tomas Dunbar Morley, MSc (Team Member) is a Researcher at IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria) and at Wageningen Economic Research in the Hague. He is a quantitative economist and has a background in econometrics, statistics and mathematics. The main focus of his work to date has been the application of micro-econometric techniques to household and farm level data in the context of food production and nutrition security.
Marie-Luise Rau, Ph.D. (Team Member), is an agri-food economist at Wageningen Economic Research, part of Wageningen University and Research (WUR). She has been working on international topics, in particular non-tariff measures (NTMs) and their effect between countries, including welfare effects in developing countries in the context of food security and Sustainable Development Goals. In addition to the quantitative analysis, she has been conducting systematic reviews on international topics, e.g., impact pathways of farmer support programmes in developing counties. She holds a Master-level certificate in “Research Synthesis for Policy and Practice” from the University of London, EPPI-Centre.
