The world has 30 global food system targets. Most countries are meeting just one.
On a day-to-day, local level, it can be all too easy to forget the perilous state that our planet is in – but the sobering reality checks from science are only getting more frequent and more serious.Now an international team of researchers, under the auspices of the Food Systems Countdown Initiative (FSCI), has looked at how humanity is doing at meeting its internationally agreed food system goals for 2030.There's bad news: we're not on track. In fact, we're very off track.In an FSCI report published in Nature Food, the researchers assessed 44 indicators. Of the 30 with defined global targets, only one is realistically within reach by 2030: mobile phone subscriptions, used as a proxy to assess social connectedness and food system resilience.The report's approach combines progress toward targets agreed by governments and international bodies, with benchmarks between countries, to provide a fuller picture of what's achievable and what isn't.9 of the indicators assessed in the report. Colored sections depict the number of countries meeting each progress point, with a full bar representing 197 countries. (Carducci et al., Nat. Food, 2026)"What makes this Countdown paper different is that it doesn't just tell countries whether they're moving in the right direction – it tells them how far they still have to go, and against a benchmark that's actually within reach," says nutrition scientist Bianca Carducci, from the Columbia Climate School in the US."That distinction between tracking trends and measuring performance is what turns a monitoring exercise into a tool for accountability."The indicators measured by the researchers cover broad aspects of food systems, including how that food is produced, transported, and consumed. Everything from natural resource depletion to dietary habits can influence how strong or weak a food system is.
