Sustainable food systems and nutrition in the 21st century: a report from the 22nd annual Harvard Nutrition Obesity Symposium.

Food systems are at the center of a brewing storm consisting of a rapidly changing climate, rising hunger and malnutrition, and significant social inequities. At the same time, there are vast opportunities to ensure that food systems produce healthy and safe food in equitable ways that promote environmental sustainability, especially if the world can come together at the UN Food Systems Summit in late 2021 and make strong and binding commitments toward food system transformation. The NIH-funded Nutrition Obesity Research Center at Harvard and the Harvard Medical School Division of Nutrition held their 22nd annual Harvard Nutrition Obesity Symposium entitled "Global Food Systems and Sustainable Nutrition in the 21st Century" in June 2021. This article presents a synthesis of this symposium and highlights the importance of food systems to addressing the burden of malnutrition and noncommunicable diseases, climate change, and the related economic and social inequities. Transformation of food systems is possible, and the nutrition and health communities have a significant role to play in this transformative process.

A multi-country assessment of factors related to smallholder food security in varying rainfall conditions.

Given that smallholder farmers are frequently food insecure and rely significantly on rain-fed agriculture, it is critical to examine climate variability and food insecurity. We utilize data from smallholder farmer surveys from 12 countries with 30 years of rainfall data to examine how rainfall variability and household resources are correlated with food security. We find that on average, households that experienced a drier than average year are 3.81 months food insecure, while households within a normal range of rainfall were 3.67 months food insecure, and wetter than average households were 2.86 months food insecure. Reduced odds of food insecurity is associated with agricultural inputs, ownership of livestock, water use efficiency, financial services, and participation in a group. However, in drier than average households, financial services as compared to agricultural inputs and agroecological practices have a greater prevalence of reduced instances of food insecurity, while agricultural inputs are more common for reduced food insecurity in wetter than average households. Only the use of fertilizer consistently results in reduced odds of food insecurity across all households regardless of rainfall, demonstrating that one-size fits all approaches to food security interventions are likely ineffective, and place-specific interventions considering climatic factors are critically important.

Markets, climate change, and food security in West Africa.

Food price fluctuations, which will be exacerbated by climate change, make West African food security even more tenuous.