This is basically a press release for The Food Systems Economic Commission, a ghoulish think tank for greenwashed liberal policies. Its primary contributors draw from McKinsey, “green” capitalists, useless NGOs offering technocratic solutions that avoid challenging the key status quo, other liberal think tanks, and World Bank (bad things, not to be trusted). And various academics (they run the gamut). There’s a reason they all have headshots like every other soulless C-suite exec.

An easy way to tell whether an article on this topic is full of it is to see whether it highlights food sovereignty. Major functions of World Bank and the IMF are to undermine food sovereignty as a condition of receiving loans countries are forced to take on due to the global economic (and military) system. To make imports (usually from the US) cheaper than domestic production for large categories of foods, as richer countries maintain their own food production subsidies while the loans are conditioned on destroying recipients’ subsidies.

Neither this article nor its source have anything to say about food sovereignty or these international organs of capital that dictate agricultural policy across the global south, but they do talk about deforestation without describing its root causes and call for using more satellite data derived from African countries.

This is fundamentally a political question and not one that will be answered by a think tank such as this. To understand food sustainability, we have to materially ask how the food system works and why it is seemingly so strange. For example, why is slashing the Brazilian rainforest to grow soy for cattle to be killed and sold to Europeans and Americans (1) somehow cheaper than doing the same in America and Europe and (2) valued above indigenous land rights? What happened when policy changes are attempted (ex: what happened to Lula? To indigenous people?)?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

All in all, the damages caused by the current system — how food is produced, marketed, and consumed — add up to $15 trillion in losses a year.

It’s time for a makeover, the authors of the report argue, which could garner up to $10 trillion in health and economic benefits (equivalent to roughly 8 percent of global GDP in 2020).

I think the cost-benefit analysis overall is clear,” Vera Songwe, co-chair of the FSEC and executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa, said in a press call today.

Health costs alone related to failures in our food system add up to a bulk of current losses — $11 trillion a year, according to the FSEC report.

Continuing current trends would exacerbate undernutrition in other parts of the world, with food insecurity causing 640 million people to be underweight.

The report is the culmination of four years of investigation by the FSEC, including comprehensive literature reviews, case studies, and economic modeling.

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