The Global Panel meet with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change

Today, 10th October 2024 members of the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition held a roundtable meeting with Grant Merrick, Head of Agriculture & Food, The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and other invited colleagues, to discuss how to scale up agro-ecology initiatives in Africa in the context of the Panel’s strategic work on food system transformation. The discussion was also used to inform the Panel’s analysis in the Resilience project. Global Panel attendees included Sir John Beddington, Prof Sandy Thomas, Emmy Simmons, Tom Arnold, Prof Patrick Webb, Prof Tim Benton, and Derek Flynn.

The key areas of discussion included

• The need for faster progress on food-system transformation to provide sustainable, healthy diets for all, and the faltering progress on malnutrition in low and middle income countries.
• Accelerating transgression of boundaries for planetary and human health, and the systemic factors that are behind that.  
• The importance of intervening throughout the food-system.
• The Global Panel’s view that the threats to food systems and the consequences for human health over the next 10 to 20 years are highly under-estimated by the global policy community.  
• To use the discussion to inform our own thinking –relating to the present Global Panel project on resilience, and our proposal for a new 2-year Foresight project.  

Colleagues committed to continued collaborative working, to achieve shared goals.