Abstract
Food systems have a profound impact on diets, nutrition, health, economic development, and environmental sustainability. Yet their complexity poses a persistent challenge in identifying the policy actions that are needed to improve human and planetary health outcomes. Typologies are a useful classification tool to identify similarities and differences among food systems, while reducing this analytical complexity. This study presents a new food system typology, implemented at the country level using parsimonious data that characterize food supply chains, food environments, consumer-related factors, and key outcomes, including dietary intake, nutritional status, health, and environmental impacts. Five food system types are identified: rural and traditional; informal and expanding; emerging and diversifying; modernizing and formalizing; and industrial and consolidated. Patterns across the five system types in key outcome variables align with narratives provided by the food systems and nutrition transition literature, demonstrating the usefulness of this classification method. Substantial heterogeneity nonetheless still exists within individual food system types. Therefore, the recommended use of the typology is in early stages of hypothesis generation, to identify potential risk factors or constraints in the food system that can be explored further at national and sub-national levels.
Highlights
In the past decade, the critical role of food systems in shaping human and planetary health has been firmly established (Popkin et al, 2012; Springmann et al, 2018; Willett et al, 2019)
The countries included in the typology represent 97% of the global population, 93% of global land area, and 97% of global gross domestic product (GDP)
The food system typology presented here provides a tool for reducing some of this complexity in the analysis of food systems
Summary
The critical role of food systems in shaping human and planetary health has been firmly established (Popkin et al, 2012; Springmann et al, 2018; Willett et al, 2019). Conceptual issues in characterizing food systems and their various components have challenged global and national discussions These issues stem in part from the complexity of food systems, which are defined as the combination of all the diverse elements and processes involved in producing, processing, distributing, marketing, preparing, and consuming food. When applied to national food systems, a typology can help to identify countries with similar food systems that may be more likely to share common drivers of dietary, economic, and environmental change and be responsive to similar policy actions or technological or institutional innovations It can likewise help demarcate the boundaries beyond which lessons from one context may not translate well to another
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