Some lessons from a life in food policy

When I was 15 years old, I learned something startling about myself. For the first time, a doctor told me that I was malnourished. The doctor pointed out that my night blindness and anemia were symptoms of vitamin A and iron deficiencies, and so he gave me nutrition supplements and recommended that I eat more meat and fish. For 15 years, I had lived in a small village in southeastern China, subsisting on a diet largely of rice (which contains calories but has little nutritional value) and vegetables. Occasionally we ate fish and eggs. Meat was a once-a-year treat at the Chinese New Year, when the whole village would slaughter and share a couple of pigs. Everyone in my village ate the way I did. We did not recognize malnutrition when we saw it, because to us it looked normal. We were all malnourished.

Now, as I look back on my past decade as director general of IFPRI, I can see how my own life illustrates the promise of food policy to change human lives. At the end of 2019, my term as director general comes to an end, and both IFPRI and I will begin new chapters. I have been able take this opportunity to reflect on some of my experiences and lessons I have learned about how we can best exploit the promise of food policy to eradicate hunger and ensure food and nutrition security for all while we also protect our environment and planet.

• A changing global food policy landscape: Since I entered the field of food policy in the late 1970s, the global agri-food policy landscape has changed in many ways, both expected and unexpected. Research and policy focused on boosting production of staple grains to meet the demands of rising populations from the 1970s to the 1990s, shifted to a broader focus around the Millennium Development Goals in 2000, and grappled with food price spikes, extreme weather, and others challenges in the 2000s and 2010s. With the Sustainable Development Goals, the development community has directed new attention to gender equality, nutrition, urbanization, and climate change, recognizing the need for an integrated approach for food security. And since 2017, anti-globalization sentiments have risen, with wide-ranging implications for trade, investments, migration, climate change, global governance, and more. This is the changing context within which IFPRI and its partners around the world must chart a path forward. I have seen IFPRI not only adapt to these trends, but also help shape the debates and narratives using its data, its research, and its global and national-level engagement.
• Start with local context: In this complex environment, one lesson has become quite clear: effective food policy must be specific to the political, economic, geographic, social, and cultural environment where it takes place. Much of the power to advance people's food and nutrition security comes from national and local policies, and to make a difference, IFPRI must be on the ground, where countries are confronting challenges and seeking solutions every day. Over the past 10 years, we have extended IFPRI's presence across the globe. This decentralization has helped us find more effective ways to work with local policymakers. Rather than focusing on research priorities determined at headquarters in Washington D.C., we now work in a more demand-driven way to answer the policy questions raised by people on the ground.
• Work in partnership: The complexity and interdependence of the world's agri-food systems mean that working alone is no longer an option. We have heard a lot of talk in recent years about the importance of breaking out of our siloes, a task that both poses new difficulties and promises new rewards. At IFPRI, I can see the fruits of our increasingly wide and deep partnerships with external organizations and individuals. In the past, we had often found ourselves in a competitive relationship with organizations like the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP). Now we see ourselves as collaborators with these institutions. It has also been a great pleasure to have worked with different types of actors, such as private companies, civil society groups, and developing-country partners. These partnerships help raise the quality of our work, increase capacity in developing countries, and yield greater impacts.
• Food alone is not enough: We have learned another vital lesson since the days when agricultural research and food policy were focused on producing as much rice, wheat, and maize as possible. Nutrition research has shown that healthy child development depends not just on getting enough calories, but also on high-quality diets that contain essential vitamins and minerals, a healthy environment, and good care from caregivers. This recognition—which reflects my own experiences as a child—has fundamentally changed IFPRI's work. Clearly nutrition also affects people's health and well-being during the whole life cycle. IFPRI has helped open the discourse on how to advance an integrated approach to agriculture, nutrition, and health. We have mainstreamed nutrition into all of IFPRI's research programs, including trade, production, marketing, and the environment. And our work has pushed donors to support a great deal of work on nutrition as well.
• Use a food systems lens: As we better understand our complex and interconnected world, we have also learned that our work must increasingly be guided by considering not individual sectors and components, but entire food systems. We will need to go beyond traditional ways of thinking about the food system, and invest more in new areas of research, like making food industries more inclusive, efficient, and conducive to promoting healthy diets and sustainable production and distribution. A food systems lens sometimes presents trade-offs, but we want to minimize these and promote win-win solutions. Our goal must be not merely a productive agricultural system, but rather a healthy and sustainable agrifood system that can meet the needs of an urbanizing world impacted by conflict and climate change. IFPRI's leadership has helped highlight the need for this kind of integrated, food systems approach. I have made efforts to reflect this approach in my engagement with partners going beyond the traditional networks in economics, agriculture, and rural development.

I am incredibly proud of IFPRI's accomplishments over the years, only some of which are described here. Through their curiosity, insights, and hard work, IFPRI researchers have changed the food policy landscape, and I have been fortunate to play a supporting role. Of course, there will continue to be room for improvement and growth, and IFPRI faces challenges of its own. I have seen first-hand how the transformative power of food policy reform can save lives and improve well-being for millions. This is how I know that IFPRI and its partners worldwide can draw on the lessons of the past and a spirit of innovation for the future to achieve a world where hunger and malnutrition are only a memory.

Shenggen Fan is Director General of IFPRI.