Partnership pursues new approaches to productive, sustainable food systems

Food production systems across the globe have detrimental shortcomings: in the worst cases, systems can actively lead to the degradation of the environment, significantly contribute to climate change, and fail to deliver healthy diets for a growing population.

However, a multi-disciplinary team of agricultural researchers and development practitioners proposes a new approach to tackle these unwieldy problems. They seek solutions that prioritize sustainably and improve food security and nutrition through targeted, custom solutions for agricultural practices and technologies.

Developed by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in collaboration with the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), this new methodology aims to transform national food systems by achieving consensus between multiple stakeholders and building on successful participatory agricultural research experiences.

The Integrated Agri-food System Initiative (IASI) is designed to generate strategies, actions, and quantitative, Sustainable-Development-Goals-aligned targets that have a significant likelihood of supportive public and private investment.

​​The IASI methodology is based on successful integrated development projects implemented by CIMMYT in Mexico and Colombia, the latter in partnership with the Alliance Bioversity-CIAT, which engaged multiple public, private and civil sector collaborators in local maize systems enhancement. These initiatives took advantage of sociopolitical “windows of opportunity” that helped build multiple stakeholder consensus around health, nutrition, food security, and development aspirations in both countries.

The work also relies on CIMMYT’s knowledge management framework for agri-food innovation systems: Agricultural Knowledge Management for Innovation (AKM4I). This framework was designed to help agricultural development practitioners understand how farming skills and abilities are developed, tested, and disseminated to improve farming systems in real-life conditions.

With the AKM4I framework in mind, the IASI methodology offers public officials and development practitioners the possibility to transform food systems by scaling out innovative farming practices and technologies that lead to sustainably managed natural resources and improved nutrition and food security.

The main steps to implement the IASI methodology are:

• Diverse experts examine the current status and the business-as-usual scenario based on analysis of the socioeconomic, political, and sectoral context and model-based projections;
• Stakeholders determine a preferred future scenario based on an assessment of national implications and define drivers of change toward a desired scenario;
• Defined criteria are applied to stakeholder and expert inputs to validate drivers of change and to identify strategies and actions — for example, public policies, value chain and market interventions, and biotechnology applications — that can steer toward the preferred future scenario, which are then reviewed and prioritized by high-level decision-makers;
• Stakeholders agree on measurable targets and tangible, time-bound actions toward the preferred future scenario;
• Stakeholders build shared commitment to a tactical implementation plan among traditional, non-traditional, and new partners;
• Ongoing stakeholder engagement is organized around an online dashboard that tracks actions and progress toward targets and supports course correction and coordinated investment.

Following these steps, the IASI methodology authors propose building a “global food systems transformation network” to co-design and co-implement agricultural development projects that bring together multiple partners and donors for global agricultural systems transformation.