I’ve spent two days at the Stockholm Food Forum, which began with the Launch of the 2025 EAT Lancet Report, the first comprehensive report since the arrival of the first one in 2019. This launch was followed by a series of talks, panels, meals and events, including a panel on “food and culture” and a “time machine” into two very different 2035s. I will write further posts about what went on, but this is a first impression of the entire event.
The Launch was live-streamed, and you can still check it out here. The major findings have been summarised by a number of news outlets, including The Guardian. The actual recommendations made by EAT have not changed drastically from before. However, the new report focuses on “Justice”, a concept that was not central to the previous report. Justice is important for many different reasons, but one thing that many panels came back to was the fact that nations in what is often called the Global South are prevented from transitioning because of inequality and a lack of justice. In nations where farmers are on the brink of survival (often because of agreements with wealthy nations), there is no money for the types of investments needed to turn the food sector sustainable. As this blog has often discussed, the global food-system is not just unsustainable, it is also inherently unjust.
The Stockholm Food Forum in its entirety was a meeting place for people and organisations with very different agendas: Stakeholders included representatives for Indigenous people, farmers, NGOs working on food, venture capitalists, and military officers. This created a mostly unspoken and unaddressed tension between different understandings of “risk” and “security”. Is the production of a sustainable, international food system possible without the building of robust military systems and walls, or are such systems and walls incompatible with sustainable futures? There was also noticeable but civil friction between those who think that finance/green capitalism must steer the journey towards a sustainable future, and stakeholders who believe, with publications such as Earth for All, that the key to a successful transition is a new economic paradigm created through a “reboot” of the economic system.
In addition to this, as one meeting participant expressed it: “Does the concept of justice extend to non-human people?” At a time of rapid biodiversity loss, this is an important question. Maybe an issue for the next EAT Lancet report.