Address multicrisis by mainstreaming sustainable food finance

Good Food Finance Network brief on food, finance, and policy insights from 77th UN General Assembly

The 77th Session of the United Nations General Assembly took place this month in the midst of a storm of converging crises, driven in part by skewed incentives in food, energy, and finance. Worsening climate disruption is reducing access to fresh water, threatening food supplies, and intensifying vulnerability across a diverse range of countries and communities.

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has worsened global food insecurity and a global cost-of-living crisis, and the Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy, and Finance, finds “1.2 billion people live in countries exposed to a ‘perfect storm’ of all three dimensions at once,” the Good Food Finance Network reports on policy insights emerging from the 77th UNGA. The key question is:

Can we address emergency food shortages and price crises, while also advancing systems transformation in line with long-term resilience imperatives?

There is evidence that unaddressed nature and climate risk could cost major food and agriculture companies 26% of their total value. On the other hand:

“Early movers can mitigate risk of value loss across food and agriculture and pursue a share of the USD$4.5 trillion opportunity that will accompany a land use transition that is as profound as the energy transition.”

The tools for making this happen are coming into focus and being put to work. Mobilizing national public finance and mainstream financial resources will require actions to create additional fiscal space—access funds already in public budgets that can be realigned and deployed to catalyze change.

The Good Food Finance Network is responding to the need for multi-dimensional performance metrics and coordinated action between scales and across sectors, through the work of Catalyst Groups on Metrics, Data Systems, and Value Chains. Catalyst Groups focused on Investors and on Public Finance are working to address cooperative approaches to scaling up and mainstreaming good food finance interventions.

The tools are being put in place to make the needed transformational investments possible. Data systems are being developed to clearly reveal the higher overall value of those transformational investments. Cooperative and co-investment strategies are being designed to connect major funding flows with action opportunities across value chains, at even the smallest scales.