The role of research in global food and nutrition security

Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life is the theme of the 99th World Expo in Milan in 2015. To elaborate this theme the EU established a scientific steering committee to advise on the challenges of global food and nutrition security. The Expo 2015 EU Scientific Steering Committee, established to provide expert advice on the Expo’s theme, has produced this discussion paper to launch a debate, to foster cross-disciplinary exchange, define research questions, and identify the EU’s role in addressing global food and nutrition security.There is unlikely to be any single or easy solution to tackle food and nutrition security fully and many of the challenges of ensuring global food and nutrition security cannot be adequately addressed without the participation of the research community. The EU has excellent intellectual resources which can be brought to bear to mitigate the growing risks of global food and nutrition insecurity, with the desired outcomes of improving economic growth, public health and the environment. To address these broad challenges both new knowledge and enhanced movement of knowledge into use is needed. The committee has identified research challenges across seven broad themes and these are discussed in detail in the paper, along with many specific examples of the associated research questions. There are a number of cross-cutting structural issues to enhance the utility of knowledge-generation within the EU that are interlinked to make a “virtuous spiral”. Indeed, initially, strategic analysis of the future (“foresighting”) should set the research needs via a systems approach. Research undertaken, by Member States, by the EU and globally, can then generate interdisciplinary knowledge to address the needs of the “multiple bottom lines” for economic, public and environmental “health”. The research effort across different countries also needs aligning to ensure its complementarity. The knowledge generated then needs to be utilised to create technological and social innovation (including via education). Innovation then creates, in turn, social and economic change. This, coupled with global development and environmental change over time, then requires the forecasting to be updated.