Professor Sheryl Hendriks, Head of the Department of Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development at the University of Pretoria has been at the forefront of preparatory actions for the United Nations Food Systems Summit.

The Summit will be held in September and promises to offer a very different outcome to previous summits. Termed the 'people’ summit’, this summit includes innovations to ensure long-lasting commitment from all stakeholders to providing healthier and more sustainable food systems in future.

The uniqueness of the Summit is the identification of game-changing solutions backed by the latest scientific evidence. Prof Hendriks is among the 25 scientists participating in the Scientific Group, an independent group of leading researchers and scientists worldwide. Its members are responsible for ensuring the science's robustness, breadth, and independence that underpins the Summit. Sheryl has been representing the Scientific Group, working alongside Dr Lawrence Haddad, the leader of Action Track one, supporting the identification of game-changing solutions – ideas that food system stakeholders can consider as part of a strategy to speed up delivery on the Sustainable Development Goals before 2030.

As the leader of many transdisciplinary programmes and projects in the past, working on complex and complicated social challenges is not novel to Prof Hendriks. In fact, she was part of the High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) that first defined food systems in a 2014 report. She has co-led the drafting of the Scientific input for the Summit’s Action Track one (to ensure access to safe and nutritious food for all by 2030) and contributed to the drafting guidelines on healthy diets and the Food Systems Countdown Report. She has participated in numerous independent dialogues, including the African Think Tank dialogues on  African food system transformation and led the drafting of a paper on the role of science, technology and innovation in African food systems. She will be contributing to additional dialogues, including South Africa’s national conversation and those of the Alliance for Food and Climate Systems Transformation.

One of her most significant contributions to the Summit is coordinating a working group commissioned by the Chair of the Scientific Group, Prof Joachim von Braun, on costing the hidden costs of our food system. The recently released report is the first to monetise the environmental and health costs of our current food system and identify the true price of our food. Understanding the enormous costs of unhealthy food and the environmental impact of its production, processing, storage and transportation highlights the magnitude and urgency of change required to transform food systems.