Commentary on foresight and trade-off analysis for agriculture and food systems

The papers and ideas on foresight and trade-off analysis presented in this issue are very timely. They come as our agriculture, food, and related resource systems are experiencing severe shocks (immediate as well as longer term) that call for unprecedented responses under a high degree of uncertainty. At the same time, a key part of the international agricultural research system is undergoing a fundamental restructuring that challenges us with both need and opportunity to rethink research priorities to inform decision making and improve agriculture and food system outcomes. These papers offer insights into how foresight and trade-off analysis can help us meet the complex, integrated changes that we are currently facing—and will continue to face for many years to come. Thinking about the future and weighing alternative options are, of course, nothing new. We do both daily, often subconsciously. What is new in the context of agri-food systems in recent years is the scale, complexity, and interconnectedness of these systems themselves. In introducing this collection, Barrett et al. (this issue) note that these systems have largely evolved in an uncoordinated way, given that they are driven by the individual decisions of hundreds of millions of producers and billions of consumers around the world, not to mention countless intermediaries and highly heterogeneous environmental and economic contexts. These features pose massive challenges to identifying and implementing the needed policy responses to help balance multiple goals ranging from environmental sustainability and food security to equity in access to economic opportunities across the value chain. The number of studies and reports on foresight and trade-offs related to agri-food systems has grown rapidly alongside these challenges—indeed to the point where it is difficult to keep up with them. One of the services that this collection of papers offers is to review a subset of those reports. Zurek et al. (this issue) focus particularly on a selection related to climate change and the environment, while Lentz (this issue) focuses particularly on foresight related to gender, poverty, and nutrition. Antle and Valdivia (this issue) in turn note the importance of analysis that explicitly recognizes and evaluates the trade-offs between multiple and diverse goals and outcomes at a range of scales.