Last week, I had the privilege of delivering the closing keynote at the I World Food Policy Conference hosted at Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville. The conference brought together researchers, policymakers, practitioners, civil society actors and international organizations working on some of the defining food policy challenges of our time: climate change, nutrition, conflict, inequality, resilience, governance and the human right to food.
My keynote focused on a question that increasingly sits at the centre of global debates: what does it actually mean to build agrifood systems around human dignity rather than around exclusion, concentration and structural inequality?
I began with the story of Rimas, a ten-year-old Syrian girl living in a refugee camp near Erbil. Her story, documented in recent UNICEF research, stayed with me because it captures many of the contradictions of modern food systems in a single image. Surrounded by ultra-processed foods, digital advertising and unhealthy products that are cheaper and more accessible than fresh food, Rimas is not simply facing an individual nutritional challenge. She is living inside a food environment shaped by poverty, displacement, weak regulation and unequal power dynamics.
And that is precisely the point. Too often, food debates remain trapped in production statistics, yields or supply chains. But today’s food crises are increasingly crises of governance. Hunger is rarely only about lack of food. More often, it is about inequality, exclusion, affordability, unhealthy food environments, environmental degradation and lack of accountability.
This is why the right to food matters so much today.Not as an abstract legal principle. Not as rhetoric. But as a practical governance framework capable of asking uncomfortable but necessary questions. Who shapes food systems? Who benefits from them? Who is excluded from decision-making? Who carries the costs of unhealthy diets, environmental collapse or market concentration? And ultimately: are our food systems serving human dignity, or undermining it?
The right to food changes the conversation because it transforms people from passive beneficiaries into rights holders, and governments from voluntary providers into duty bearers. It introduces participation, accountability, transparency, non-discrimination and rule of law into the heart of food policy.
And this matters enormously in the world we are entering. We increasingly live in societies where hunger and obesity coexist side by side. Where the cheapest calories are often the least healthy. Where children are systematically exposed to aggressive marketing of ultra-processed foods. Where low-income communities are not necessarily those eating the least food, but often those eating the least healthy food.
For decades, we imagined hunger mainly as emptiness. Today, hunger increasingly comes packaged in plastic.That transformation forces us to rethink governance itself.Policies such as front-of-pack nutrition labelling, regulation of junk food marketing directed at children, school food standards or healthy public procurement are not only public health measures. They are governance decisions about what societies choose to protect, regulate and prioritize. Countries such as Chile, Brazil, Mexico or India have shown, in different ways, that food systems are not immutable natural forces. They are shaped by law, institutions, public policy and political choices. And therefore, they can be transformed.
Another major reflection running throughout the conference concerned power. Increasingly, decisions affecting seeds, agricultural inputs, retail systems, advertising, processing chains and even narratives around diets are concentrated among a relatively small number of actors. Recognizing this reality is not about demonizing markets or rejecting the private sector. The private sector is indispensable. But markets alone do not automatically generate equitable, healthy or sustainable outcomes.
Public governance remains essential. Without regulation, unhealthy food environments become normalized. Without accountability, inequalities deepen. Without public safeguards, commercial logic progressively displaces nutritional, social and environmental objectives.
This is why rights-based approaches matter. They insist that food systems must operate within frameworks of dignity, public interest and democratic accountability.
One of the strongest messages emerging from the discussions in Seville was the importance of territorial and local governance. Food systems are ultimately lived locally: in school meals, neighbourhood shops, municipal procurement, local markets, transport systems, water access, urban peripheries and rural landscapes.
Some of the most inspiring innovations today are happening precisely at that level. Cities developing food strategies. Municipalities linking school feeding programmes to local farmers. Food Policy Councils bringing together producers, nutritionists, civil society, researchers, local authorities and citizens around the same table.
These spaces matter because they rehumanize governance. Food policy stops being an abstract technical document and becomes a collective conversation about health, territory, livelihoods, children, budgets and dignity.
The conference also reinforced something that becomes impossible to ignore in today’s world: resilience cannot be separated from justice. Highly efficient systems can also be extremely fragile when they are unequal, concentrated and disconnected from communities. Exclusion creates fragility. Participation creates resilience.
The right to food helps frame climate action not only as an environmental necessity, but also as a question of justice, dignity and entitlement.
The same applies to conflict. One of the themes I addressed during the keynote was the growing weaponization of food systems in war. Modern conflicts increasingly destroy not only infrastructure, but the very systems through which communities sustain life: fields, fisheries, irrigation systems, markets, roads and agricultural livelihoods. In these contexts, the right to food becomes inseparable from international humanitarian law, protection of civilians and peacebuilding itself.
And yet, even in the middle of destruction, communities continue planting, cooking, rebuilding markets and sharing food. Those acts are not marginal. They are the foundations of recovery.
Perhaps that is ultimately what stayed with me most strongly after these days in Seville. Food systems are not only technical systems. They are profoundly human systems. They are built through care, memory, culture, relationships and trust. And therefore, transforming food systems is not only a technical challenge. It is also an ethical and political one.
The central question before us is whether we are capable of building agrifood systems centred on human dignity rather than exclusion. Systems where healthy diets are not privileges for some, but realities accessible to all. Systems where governance is not captured by the most powerful voices, but shaped through participation, accountability and justice.
Because food systems are never only about food. They are about the kind of societies we choose to build — and the kind of future we believe is still possible.
