Prof Sheryl Hendriks from the Department of Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development gave her inaugural address on the 5th of August 2021. Here is what she had to say:

"Professor Kupe, Professor Erasmus, colleagues from UP, partners, collaborators, students, graduates and family, good evening, and thank you for the opportunity to present this address.

Last week's United Nations Food Systems Summit's Pre-Summit called out the urgency for collaborative action on resetting the future direction of food systems. Building on the core theme of the Sustainable Development Goals, 'leave no one behind', the Pre-Summit followed a unique, intensive and inclusive preparatory phase and format. The establishment of a Scientific Group to guide and inform the foundations for evidence-based science was a first for World Summits. I was privileged to be asked to join the 25 internationally recognised scientists under the leadership of the Chair, Prof Joachim von Braun, who has invited my engagement in several exciting international science engagements. True to my nature, I could not but roll up my sleeves to straddle the work of the Scientific Group and collaborate with World Food Prize Laureate Dr Lawrence Haddad, who leads the Action Track to identify practical solutions to ensure safe and nutritious food for all.

This year's food summit is not the first international summit to focus on food security and nutrition. At the 1974 summit, Henry Kissinger (the US Secretary of State) declared that no child would go to bed hungry within ten years. Neither is it the first to bring attention to human rights, sustainable development, climate change, conflict and crises. Obviously, it is the first food summit to be held during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also the first world food conference to include all these factors together in the context of our future.

Food is essential to human life. What we eat and how much of it is available in large determines our future. We are starkly aware of this fact with COVID's food supply and distribution disruptions, and the role nutrition plays in our individual responses to COVID susceptibility, infection and recovery.

As already stated, this year's Summit is the first to bring together all these elements. It is the first to consider the multisectoral trade-offs and unintended consequences of actions and focus on stakeholder-generated solutions rather than problems. Moreover, there will not be a Rome Declaration on Food Systems as is the tradition with such events. Instead, countries will provide roadmaps for implementation in September, backed by coalitions of stakeholder communities.

The road to the Summit has been long, finding its roots in the 1948 Declaration on Human Rights. A series of World Food Conferences and Summits held in 1963, 1974, 1996 and 2009 were triggered by international food crises. Their foci reflected the iterative nature of our deepening understanding of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition, converging in a food systems approach as the way forward post the September Summit and the current pandemic.

Food security was initially defined in 1948 as a post-World War production challenge. But this was to change as Amartya Sen influenced our understanding of the human face of hunger and shaped the 1974 summit amidst a global food shortage. This Summit set out the Universal Declaration on the Eradication of Hunger and Malnutrition. The 1996 Summit committed to halving extreme hunger by 2015, while the 2002 Summit deliberated on the lack of progress towards ending hunger. The 2009 Summit sought to reflect on the global food shortage and the resultant high food prices of 2007 and 2008.

In this address, I will attempt to demonstrate how this progressive understanding has led to the emergence of food systems approaches while weaving in my personal journey of engagement in this progression and the contribution of my work to South African, African and International discussions on solving food insecurity. I will conclude by setting out what I believe the role of food systems approaches will be in the era post the COVID pandemic.

Earlier this July, the 2021 State of Food Insecurity report was released, reporting an 18% increase in the number of hungry people worldwide over the last year. It painted a sad reality that 22% (one in five) of children under five years of age are stunted—short for their age—a sign of continual undernourishment (FAO et al., 2021). At the same time, close to 7% are wasted—a sign of acute or severe deprivation (FAO et al., 2021). One in five people in Africa is hungry. Every five minutes, a child dies of hunger in the world.

To me, these facts are highly distressing! They motivate me to contribute to solving the problem by training students who can multiply my work, conducting and publishing work to advance the knowledge, writing in popular media to raise awareness, and participating in transdisciplinary policy engagements to give voice to the hungry. My network of graduates leads strategic continental, regional and national programmes in food security across the continent, helping those in need and guiding policy decisions. I am proud of their efforts.

It was my stubborn refusal at age five to enrol in an upper-middle-class primary school, much to the utter frustration of my late mother, that set the course of my life's work. Instead, I attended a primary school in our local, working-class neighbourhood alongside children from one of the apartheid era's poor white state housing schemes. Here, I came to understand the impact of poverty and hunger and the social ills accompanying these deprivations.

In the late 1980s, I attended the relatively liberal University of Natal, where anti-apartheid protests, state-hired student informants and regular community violence between rival political parties were the order of the day. Hlengiwe Sehlapelo, now a senior researcher in the University of Pretoria's Department for Education Innovation, was a minority in our class while representing the majority in the country and was registered with special permission from the State. Hlengi deepened my understanding of the ills of apartheid society, sharpening my compassion for those marginalised by policies and circumstances.

When granted the opportunity to participate in a survey of households in rural Swayimane, the plateau of Table Mountain between Pietermaritzburg and Durban, under the supervision of Professor Michael Lyne, I jumped at the opportunity to understand more about household economics. And so began my transdisciplinary food security research endeavours. My PhD research focussed on agricultural growth linkages and exposed me to the emerging literature on household food insecurity following Amartya Sen's global influence in the 1980s and the documentation of household coping strategies in the Ethiopian and East Africa famines in the same era.

Returning home from a keynote presentation at the Zambian Animal Science Conference on the shores of Lake Kariba in 1997, I told my husband, Roelie, that I was changing career directions to pursue food security. Despite grave reservations from some University’s managers, the then DVC, Profesor Ahmed Bawa, helped me establish an academic programme and a transdisciplinary research programme to enable this vision.

Before I provide an overview of the development of food insecurity and its relationship to food systems, let me pause to answer the question my sons asked as they grew up: 'Mom, exactly what do you do at work?' Well, I am a food security researcher. That's not simple to explain in a few words, especially when, as I will demonstrate, the concept keeps evolving. According to the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (2021):

food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.

I like to demonstrate the concept using a continuum I published in 2015 (Figure 1), downloaded over 11000 times from the journal Food Security. It indicates that essentially everyone can be positioned on a spectrum of food security outcomes.

The 2014 Rome Declaration on Nutrition redefined malnutrition to include three forms of malnutrition, represented on the continuum as:

1. Undernutrition—ranging from the extreme, starvation through to acute (constant), chronic (long-term inadequate food intake);
2. Micronutrient deficiencies—also considered hidden hunger— include inadequate dietary diversity and imbalances in nutrient intakes
3. Being overweight (or obese) which is very often accompanied by micronutrient deficiencies.

On the far end of the continuum is the state of having enough of the foods required for an active, healthy life today but worrying about not having enough. At the extreme right of the continuum is the state of food security—when all the definition requirements are met. One's position on the continuum can change over time, shifting from one state to another – either becoming more or less food insecure. Changes can happen suddenly with a significant shock or slowly over time.

So, as a food security researcher, I spend my time trying to understand the causes, context and consequences of food insecurity and malnutrition, identifying possible solutions to overcoming these challenges and looking for evidence that these solutions can lift people out of hunger. Sometimes this is complex. For example, roughly one in five children in South Africa is stunted—that is, they show signs of chronic, extended undernourishment. Yet, we see in South Africa's most impoverished communities that undernourished children and obese mothers live in the very same house. They share the same simplistic diet, devoid of diversity and the nutrient-rich foods essential for children's growth and development.

Yet, many scientific and technological solutions to malnutrition and food insecurity exist. However, decades of development planning, international assistance and declarations of intent have not ensured that no one goes hungry. Moreover, the number of hungry people has increased in recent years, and the pandemic has exacerbated this. Progress on reducing malnutrition is patchy and inadequate, as policies and programmes fail to deliver the direct impacts expected from siloed sectoral interventions in agriculture, health and education.

My research on these topics was largely local until an unforgettable meeting in 2006 with Dr Ousmane Badiane (formerly with the International Food Policy Research Institute), which saw me drafted into the team to lead the Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Plan's framework and plan of action. Rather than documenting the plight and misery of hunger, Ousmane's mission was to change the narrative on African development and foster what he referred to as the 'convergence agenda'. I have to admit it took me some time to understand his concept of convergence. Under his patient mentorship, I saw the policy convergence agenda take hold in the global and African development agenda.

Solving complex societal challenges requires careful integration of comprehensive packages of complementary programmes across government sectors. I was swept up into a rapid unfolding of a new development paradigm by CAADP's core architects, Ousmane Badiane, Richard Mkandawire and Jeff Hill, who constantly pushed the boundaries of understanding the complexity of food insecurity and how to address it. The current work on food systems takes this convergence a step further.

While food insecurity is generally driven by adverse and extreme weather events, economic downturns and conflict, hunger is disproportionately experienced by those who are poor, marginalised and displaced. Fragile countries are disproportionally burdened. Inequalities in society and the food system make food inaccessible to the most vulnerable populations and deny people dignity and fundamental human rights.

As I argued in my 2018 FR Tomlinson Memorial Lecture,

perhaps the separate trajectories of development policy and the lack of a cadre of professions able to think not only in the box (discipline), outside of the box (beyond their discipline) but without a box (not constrained by discipline boundaries), has deprived millions in developing countries of the realisation of the inalienable right to be free from hunger and malnutrition (Hendriks, 2018).

I have tried to capture these lessons in a collaborative textbook to support learning at other institutions (Hendriks, 2020). I am working with Dr Suresh Babu, a champion of food security capacity development, to compile a handbook covering the approaches and applications of various disciplines in solving food security challenges.

Two terms on the UN Committee for World Food Security's High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) on Food Security and Nutrition under the leadership of two World Food Prize Laureates, Professors MS Swaminathan and Per Pinstrup-Andersen, advanced my integration of knowledge even further. These HLPE reports spanned eight complex contemporary topics and built the trust of global policymakers in scientific evidence, establishing the importance of evidence-based policy decisions in the UN system.

The HLPE first defined the term food security in a 2014 report on food losses and waste. The Panel's report brought nutrition and food systems into the spotlight through the 2017 report on Nutrition and Food Systems, initiating the journey to the 2021 UNFSS. The 2021 report states that

[f]ood systems encompass the various elements and activities that relate to the production, processing, distribution, preparation and consumption of food, as well as the output of these activities, including socioeconomic and environmental outcomes (HLPE, 2021).

Furthermore, the report states that '[a] food systems framework captures the complexity of the interrelationships of drivers of change at a broader scale with the functioning of food systems' (HLPE, 2021). This definition emphasises that food systems approaches go beyond increasing production. Adaptation through sustainable intensification and agricultural diversification has to be combined with the creation of off-farm opportunities, processing, packaging, and distribution systems.

A first-of-its-kind Inter-Academy Partnership project, initiated by Prof Volker ter Meulen, former President of the IAP, offered me an opportunity to focus on regional food security and nutrition challenges. A consensus study that compared the science, technology and innovation opportunities across regions was an insightful learning experience for the over 130 scientists who participated. The reports informed the G20 meeting in July 2019 (IAP, 2018). They were adapted for input into this year's Food Systems Summit, offering ways in which STI can step up to support food system transformation on multiple fronts, including: 

a) improving production systems and restoring degraded systems (including soil quality),

b) innovation in the processing and packaging of foods,

c) improving human nutrition, health and productivity,

d) addressing fragility and instability, and

e) greater access to information and transparent monitoring and accountability systems (NASAC, 2021).

 

COVID has shown us that women and girls are disproportionately affected by crises. Any disruption to a child's nourishment carries long-term consequences. Therefore, ending hunger is a development imperative—hunger and undernourishment rob children of the chance to grow, develop and learn. Hunger deprives a child of their future potential in society, the workforce and the economy, trapping generations in lives of poverty and perpetuating hunger and undernourishment. Hunger perpetuates a vicious cycle of deprivation across generations.

COVID has exposed the impact of poor nutrition across the world. Lockdowns have disrupted food systems, access to food and supplies and led to job and income losses. Millions of children have not had access to what is sometimes their only meal a day provided through schools. Routine child vaccinations have not been rolled out. The burden on the health system has disrupted access to medical services, including public health campaigns, child growth monitoring, and maternal health and chronic disease management. There are fears that new non-communicable diseases and long COVID will further burden the system.  

We have entered a vicious cycle, with poor nutrition at its centre. Poor diets and malnutrition re-programme metabolic functions, predispose people to disease and affect immunity and recovery from disease. The pandemic has raised awareness of the need for action regarding the underlying causes of food insecurity (economic shocks, production shocks, conflict) and the underlying causes of malnutrition (poverty, income, access, and lack of diversity). We are painfully aware of the role of COVID comorbidities such as cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes, overweight and obesity on morbidity and mortality.

Ultimately, low human productivity affects GDP and general societal wellbeing. We have seen the fragility of systems and expect that the reprioritisation of domestic and international funds to cope with increased hunger amid a health crisis will cancel the past decade's economic growth, especially in Africa. Countries such as South Africa will not rise to the aspirations of the SDGs unless we overcome hunger nationally and regionally.

Food systems offer the opportunity to consider comprehensive ways to address the root causes of hunger and malnutrition. Food systems go beyond previous efforts, including sustainable development approaches, as they place food at the centre of development. I believe this is crucial for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Food is a fundamental daily need. The quantity, quality and safety of food lie at the heart of our health and wellbeing. There are no cures for hunger, metabolic syndromes, and degenerative diseases that do not depend on access to safe and nutritious food for all.

COVID and food systems dialogues have raised our awareness of just how unhealthy our food systems have become. Most nutrition-related factors predisposing COVID infection, immune responses and recovery are strongly linked to the food we eat. Our food system is loaded with nutrient-depleted, highly processed, 'convenient' foods loaded with health-harming added insulin-spiking sugars and sugar alternatives, addictive additives, preservatives, favourants, and colourants. 

One of the more complex pieces of research I have been involved in has been the coordination of quantification of ‘'hidden costs' in food systems for the Summit. These costs make unsustainable and unhealthy food cheap while making sustainable healthy food expensive and unprofitable. Unsustainable production undermines the quality of natural resources, may rob communities of livelihood assets and pollute the environment, disproportionately affecting the health and livelihoods of the poor. Unsustainable food system practices may trap the poor in low wages and undesirable and unsafe working environments. Hunger is perpetuated.

While the concept of externalities in the agriculture and food system was first set out over 100 years ago by Pigou in his 1920 The Economics of Welfare, it is not until recently that we had the data and statistical capacity to calculate the complex impact of various actions across the food system. Working with Dr Adrian de Groot Ruiz from the Impact Institute in the Netherlands and Dr Mario Herrero from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia and their teams, we recently quantified the magnitude of food systems' impact on the environment and environmental health to inform the Summit deliberations.

Our analysis showed that the actual cost of these hidden environmental effects is roughly equal to 78% of the total expenditure on food per year (Hendriks et al., 2021). The impact of unhealthy food on our health is roughly 133 times the expenditure on food per year. A double blow for our health today and the next generations through environmental degradation. The true price of our current food should be at least one third higher than it currently is. In future research, we will include the social and labour elements of the right to decent jobs and fair pay, further raising the bar.

The dominant paradigm of cheap food that pervades the training of agricultural economists, in particular, will have to change. The era of cheap food is over. More than three billion and 78% of Africa's population cannot afford a healthy diet. Our current poverty lines are too low to allow for a healthy diet (FAO et al., 2021). We are certainly not proposing that food prices should rise to cover these costs. There are many ways of reducing these costs through incentives, disincentives, transparency and accountability systems, and stakeholders across the value chain, including the private sector and financial institutions. The magnitude of change in mindsets, values, behaviours and systems is significant.

The findings of this work highlight that the right to food is a fundamental tenet of humanity, linked to multiple other human rights. Through working with Constitutional Lawyer, Prof Nic Olivier, I have realised that while governments have an obligation towards these rights, citizens also have obligations to provide for such elements, leaving the role of government to provide the foundational elements necessary to achieve these rights for all people. The context and complexity of the interlinkages of these rights present some intractable challenges if we are to feed the world beyond the COVID pandemic.

The magnitude of change required to address these challenges and make food systems fairer, more sustainable, resilient and healthier requires deliberate, coordinated action from all stakeholders, including strong, enabling public policies. In addition, the change will need to be supported by institutional coordination, unambiguous food safety and health-conscious regulatory environments, greater access to information and transparent monitoring and accountability systems.

Our recently released 2021 Malabo-Montpellier Panel Report, authored by a think tank of researchers from Africa and Europe, documents how four African countries—Ghana, Malawi, Morocco and Rwanda—have comprehensive policies that provide the foundation for policy coherence across food system domains. The report, Connecting the Dots, shows how these countries provide examples of what can be done.

Dr David Nabaro, the UN Special Envoy on COVID-19, warned the delegates of the Pre-Summit last week that the pandemic is by no means over. Nevertheless, I believe that this too will pass. Science can solve complex challenges, and our systems will be more robust for the lessons we have learnt. As with the recent violent unrest and its disruption of the South African food system, we need to take the time to reflect on how we can make the entire food system more resilient. New food system approaches attempt to converge these diverse areas to accelerate progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

I believe that food systems approaches have an essential role in 'building back better' in the recovery from COVID and beyond. This is because food systems approaches bring so many disciplines together, with food at centre stage. Addressing their challenges requires working in beyond and without a box on a diversity of complex challenges. The University and the Department of Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development, and our partners within and beyond UP have the opportunity to take a leading role in South Africa, the region and Africa.

An element echoing throughout the pre-Summit preparations and dialogues is the fact that context matters. This is where our advantage lies. With more than a third of our Department's postgraduate students coming from African countries beyond South Africa, we have a strategic role in research to move towards a more sustainable, resilient, and healthier food system.

However, new approaches to training, research and policymaking are urgently needed to adopt a food systems approach to advance the development agenda. Transdisciplinary, frontier and translational research approaches offer opportunities to address these complexities. This is not beyond what we can deliver to ensure change for the better in the food systems of the future. There are several short, medium and long-term actions to consider in partnership with food systems stakeholders, including the government, the private sector, international agencies and society.

In the short term, we can support the establishment of evidence for decision-making. We will need rapid systematic reviews and consensus studies to identify relevant game-changers or solutions, document best international and local practice, record what we know about causes, context and solutions and review existing policy, programmes, coordination and institutions. We also need to gather and publicise lessons learnt from various stakeholders.

A considerable drive is necessary to retool and reskill existing professionals and develop transdisciplinary thinking in future generations of academics and practitioners. Capacity and up-skilling through professional training across the system are needed in food systems theory and thinking, specific research areas with particular gaps (such as the methodologies for capturing food loss and waste), and pertinent skills and tools (as in risk analysis and forecasting).

We particularly need to harness our young researchers' capacity by redirecting funding to internships to support research gaps and boost public sector capacity and bursaries for students who work on strategic research gaps.

In the medium-term, curriculum reform must include food systems theory and thinking and engagement skills for transdisciplinary and translational research and public engagement and communications practice. Coordination and leadership capacity is necessary, supported by think tanks and communities of practice. Infrastructure for big data analysis and management across international institutions is essential for collaborative research. At the same time, more modelling capacity (human and infrastructure) is needed across stakeholders to assess trade-offs, externalities and food system impacts to support evidence-based decision-making and learning.  

In the long term, we need the transformation of incentives for all stakeholders, including those who support transdisciplinary collaboration. In addition, more transparency, data availability and accountability will be necessary among stakeholders, while documenting the journey and lessons learnt from the transformation is essential for up- and out-scaling interventions. More importantly, we need more Malabo-Montpellier Panel approaches to celebrate success and give us hope that incremental changes and innovation can make a difference.

There is hope for a post-pandemic world in which food systems are simultaneously 

–          healthy and nutritious

–          productive and prosperous

–          equitable and inclusive

–          empowering and respectful and

–          resilient and regenerative.

 

In closing, I would like to express appreciation to those who have mentored me over my career. I have given special mention to you in this address. I look up to you and am deeply appreciative of your investment in my career development.

I thank my father, Russell, and my late mother, Rosanne Spalding, for the foundational values you imparted in Carol and me and my dad and stepmother, Petra for their ongoing encouragement. I am deeply grateful to my supportive husband, Roelie, and my wonderful sons, Kevin and Aidan. There were many times I missed parent's days, sports events, concerts and prize-givings while I travelled Africa and the globe serving the broader development agenda. However, I know that my daily dinner ramblings about my work (which I admit were over your heads in the early days) have shaped your compassion for people and passion for making a difference in the lives of others.

I thank Professors Cheryl de la Rey, Anton Ströh and Johann Kirsten for facilitating my move to UP. Thank you to my team of colleagues at the Department of Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development. Together we will make a difference in preparing the next generation of professionals to tackle the complexities of food systems to help direct future development in Africa and our beloved country, South Africa.

Professors Kupe and Erasmus, I am deeply grateful for the supportive and enabling environment at the University of Pretoria. Without the support of my Institution, I would not serve the core values to do what matters today and for the future. What an amazing privilege to work in an institution that enables staff to make a difference in a world that desperately needs our leadership and help."