Challenging the productionist paradigm. The food system is in trouble

Today's global food system needs to be revised completely - that was Tim Lang's main message to the audience at the Global Donors Platform on Rural Development annual general assembly in The Hague in January 2013.

The professor of food policy at City University London fundamentally questioned what contemporaries commonly viewed as progress in nutrition, equitable distribution and public health. This productionist paradigm, as he called it, certainly offered no long-term vision to answer the most basic questions the world was faced with.

Shifting away from a productionist paradigm, as Lang called it, and towards sustainable diets required major changes - including what he referred to as a new agenda for a good food system:

• Ensuring more investment in agriculture: growers need to benefit, not only companies
• Using farming for sustainable diets, ecosystem services and employment
• Stressing biodiversity: diets should be judged against their effect on the local environment and biodiversity
• Rethinking what progress is: a radical approach could call for less consumerism, more public institutional than private leadership and localised instead of globalised markets.

Video of the presentation and slideshow are available on the Platform's website.