The global food system has already demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for transformation – feeding billions, reducing famine risk, and driving productivity gains through science, technology, and trade. Today, that same capacity is being called upon again.
The forces reshaping the system are significant – from climate and geopolitics to artificial intelligence and shifting consumer demands. Many originate beyond the food system itself, yet their effects on food security, resilience, and environmental stability are unfolding rapidly. However, these same forces are also creating a window of opportunity to build something more resilient, more equitable, and more sustainable than what came before.
A new report by Systemiq and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation – “At the Crossroads: Food in an Age of Uncertainty”– sets out what that opportunity looks like, and how we can seize it together.
A year of analysing what global uncertainty means for the future of food systems
Systemiq partnered with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to explore what today’s converging disruptions mean for the future of food systems – and where the most promising pathways for progress lie.
In January 2026, that work culminated in a Symposium in Zurich, where more than 70 leaders from civil society, academia, finance, business, and intergovernmental organisations came together to examine where the food system is heading – and to identify where deliberate, coordinated action can shape a better outcome. Together, they stress-tested a range of plausible futures and arrived at a finding that runs counter to much of the prevailing narrative: the solution space is wider than often acknowledged. A consistent thread throughout was the need for stronger coordination mechanisms – shared analytical foundations that allow companies, investors, and governments to make sense of the transition together, rather than in isolation.
This report builds on the momentum of the Zurich Symposium and on the broader reflection and learning that unfolded over the past year. By exploring plausible futures and identifying practical areas for action, this report offers an important contribution toward the more deliberate coordination required.
Report findings: four high-confidence bets for food system transformation
This report therefore highlights four high-confidence bets – interventions judged to have robust impact, potential and relevance across multiple plausible futures – that can serve as enabling foundations for transformation.
Bet #1: Build the open, decision-grade data infrastructure the system needs
The data that producers, companies, investors, and governments most need remains fragmented, proprietary, and often incomparable. Demand for credible, structured data is growing rapidly across the system – and this bet focuses on accelerating the shift toward high-integrity environmental and production data that is accessible, interoperable, and comparable across actors and geographies. Building shared digital infrastructure – common standards, identifiers, and protocols – shifts value from controlling data to using it better.
Momentum is building, with several initiatives already moving from concept to implementation. The distributional stakes matter: deliberate investment in regions with the weakest data infrastructure is critical to ensure this transition works for everyone. Open, decision-useful data strengthens every other lever in the system.
Bet #2: Standardising risk valuation to redirect capital
Climate volatility, nature loss, water stress, and supply-chain disruption are already generating material costs across food systems – yet these risks remain poorly priced by capital markets, and that gap is now constraining the transition. This bet focuses on standardising how food system risk is translated into comparable financial terms.
When risks are measured and priced consistently, resilient practices shift from being perceived as niche or concessional to being recognised as lower-risk, long-term value protection – changing the economics of transition and redirecting capital at scale. Achieving this requires alignment across financial institutions, food and agriculture companies, scientists, data providers, and public actors. Embedding these metrics into financial architecture redirects capital at scale.
Bet #3: national food strategies in an interdependent world
National governments are re-emerging as decisive actors in food systems, with food security rising to the top of national agendas. When pursued in isolation, however, national strategies risk increasing fragmentation, inefficiency, and environmental harm. This bet supports the development of national food system strategies that are grounded in domestic realities and designed with global interdependence in mind. To be effective, this must be led at the highest levels of government, involving farming and fishing communities, major food companies, financial institutions, and public actors.
A growing number of countries are already developing national food strategies, providing an initial foundation for more coherent, system-wide action. The goal is not uniformity – it is holistic national strategies that strengthen domestic security without undermining collective resilience.
Bet #4: Institutions for systemic risk and trade off assessment coordination
Complex systems require credible institutions to make sense of risk, trade-offs, and long-term pathways. The global food system currently lacks a body that identifies systemic vulnerabilities, translates complex risk into decision-relevant insight, and supports more coordinated responses across actors. Decisions continue to be made in fragmented ways – guided by partial analysis, short time horizons, and uncoordinated signals from markets and policy. This bet focuses on building the institutional infrastructure to change that.
The first track is a senior-level working group on food system transitions – an independent, analytically rigorous platform potentially modelled on the Energy Transitions Commission, designed to help leading food companies and financial institutions make sense of how the transition is likely to unfold and what that means for priorities, sequencing, and collaboration. Its value lies in three areas: clarifying system dynamics, providing a structured setting for industry dialogue, and translating complex analysis into insights relevant for corporate and investment decisions. Its credibility depends on genuine independence, an internationally respected chair, and participation from those whose decisions most materially shape outcomes – senior leaders across the agri-food value chain alongside banks, insurers, and financial institutions with significant exposure to food- and nature-related risks.
The second track focuses on public risk management. A Food Systems Stability Board (FSSB) – modelled on the Financial Stability Board – would assess systemic vulnerabilities before they cascade into crisis, stress-testing food systems against compound shocks and encouraging countries to develop shared risk assessments and contingency plans.
Though distinct in function, both tracks serve a shared purpose: shifting food systems from reactive crisis management toward more deliberate, coordinated stewardship of systemic risk – strengthening shared analysis, improving the comparability of risks and trade-offs, and making the consequences of action, and inaction, more visible and harder to ignore.
Turning analysis into action
In a world increasingly characterised by fragmentation and structural uncertainty, the trajectory of food systems will be determined by the strategic, financial, technological, and political choices we make along the way – from which objectives get prioritised to how coordination evolves.
The throughline is clear: resilience will not emerge by default. It will depend on clearer priorities, stronger analytical foundations, and more deliberate coordination – especially in a period when geopolitical fracture is weakening the multilateral structures that once held system-level cooperation together. In a more divided world, coordination will not happen organically; it must be built intentionally, among actors willing to lead.
In that spirit, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Systemiq are advancing multiple strands of work as early contributions to this shared transformation agenda, including the development of a senior-level working group: an independent, analytically rigorous platform to help companies and financial institutions better understand food-system risks, clarify trade-offs, and align long-term strategy with resilience.
