Four Futures
of Food
Four Futures of Food: An Alternative Scenarios Briefing Report
When imagining the future, we often assume things will keep moving in the direction they have been in the recent past. In the global food web, this means we would see continued growth in global efforts to streamline the way food is bought, prepared, and consumed, and the spread of novel food products. At the same time, food-related health problems such as diabetes and heart disease would persist in developed markets, while the developing world would continue to experience food insecurity issues.
But is this really the future of food?
In the scenario briefing here, we explore a broader set of possibilities for the future of food, following four distinct shapes of change: Growth, collapse, constraint and transformation. These scenarios build on our Food Web 2020, a map and companion report that identified the forces, disruptions and interconnections reshaping the future of food.
We hope you will use this briefing as a starting point for creating responses to the ever-changing global food web, by considering how consumer behaviors and decisions shift in different large scale futures.
In the coming months, we will continue to develop the scenarios and identify deeper insight into some of the forces that will shape these futures. We will identify region-specific forecasts around emerging consumer behaviors and decisions related to food, and offer you additional tools for thinking about responding to emerging behaviors and decisions in multiple future contexts.
For more information about Food Web 2020 or the Global Food Outlook Program, please contact Dawn Alva (contact form, dalva@iftf.org, 650-233-9585).
Publication Date
2011