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National pathways for food systems transformation are limited in scope and degree of ambition

Nature Food volume 6, pages 809–816 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

The 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) marked a key moment in deliberating a transformation of the global food system. At the same time, the UNFSS process received considerable criticism for alleged industry capture and high symbolism. Here we assess the extent to which the summit has contributed to ambitious policy follow-up at national level. Using natural language processing tools, we systematically analyse and compare the content of 124 national food system pathway documents. We find that food production dominates these pathways, while issues such as food distribution, processing, consumption, environmental impacts, labour conditions and animal welfare receive minimal attention. Despite different national food system challenges, the pathways show limited variation in topics raised, closely following predefined global agendas. Our results suggest that the policy directions of UNFSS national pathways are mainly within the current food system, while more fundamental critiques of the food system are not raised.

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Fig. 1: Overview of the 50 topics per World Bank region.
Fig. 2: Number of paragraphs in the final dataset.
Fig. 3: Groups of topics per World Bank income group.
Fig. 4: Attention to the topic categories in relation to prevalence of food insecurity.

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Data availability

The source materials for this paper have additionally been made available under an MIT license via figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29307239 (ref. 38).

Code availability

All code used in the analysis has been made available under an MIT license via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15652546 (ref. 39).

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Acknowledgements

The work of R.B. was supported through the Dutch Research Council (NWO grant no.VI.Vidi.211.132).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Public Administration and Policy Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, the Netherlands

    Jeroen Candel & Robbert Biesbroek

  2. Climate Policy Radar, London, UK

    Anne J. Sietsma

Authors
  1. Jeroen Candel
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  2. Anne J. Sietsma
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  3. Robbert Biesbroek
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Contributions

J.C. and R.B. conceptualized and designed the study. A.J.S., with support of R.B., developed and executed the data collection and analysis, the outcomes of which were interpreted by J.C., A.J.S. and R.B. collectively. J.C. led the writing of the paper, with support from A.J.S. and R.B. A.J.S. made the figures.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jeroen Candel.

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Competing interests

J.C. is member of the Dutch Council on Animal Affairs. The other authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Food thanks Matthew Canfield, Shailaja Fennell and Bram Peters for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Table 1: overview of the topics, their respective label and the keywords associated.

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Candel, J., Sietsma, A.J. & Biesbroek, R. National pathways for food systems transformation are limited in scope and degree of ambition. Nat Food 6, 809–816 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-025-01206-y

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