Food Systems Research Priorities: Blueprints for the Next 5 Years [Editorial]

Abstract

n this issue we offer 26 commentaries from around the world on food systems research priorities. The cover of this issue was created from one of the group outputs of a team of 28 young scholars who convened from five continents to take a transdisciplinary look at future food systems research (see Rivera-Ferre et al.). In our call for papers, we encouraged commentaries from farm and consumer organizations, research groups, agencies, and any other stakeholders on what they felt are the key applied research priorities for the community development aspects of food systems. We framed the call in terms of filling the gaps in research and the literature with the hope that this collection of commentaries will encourage new thinking and approaches to food systems over the next few years. Indeed, the commentaries that arrived reflected the views of researchers and practitioners from dozens of countries and covered a remarkable range of topics. Some are written by individuals while a good number are written by both formal and ad hoc research groups. We were especially pleased to see several commentaries that came out of collaborative discussions of researchers and practitioners. The commentaries themselves cover a very broad swath of food systems subjects with local, regional, national, and global scopes. Most reflect on the existing literature and propose key questions that they hope to work on or encourage others to work on. In an attempt to organize the commentaries thematically, I created a very simple typology (see below) using three broad food systems domains for the rows (Production, Distribution, Consumption, plus a fourth trans-system category I simply call " Systems Perspective "), and three general sustainability domains for the columns (Social, Economic, and Environmental, plus a fourth trans-sustainability category called " Holistic Perspective "). The resulting typology consists of 16 cells into which the papers loosely fit. Of course a number of papers could have fallen into several cells; I've categorized them by the predominance of their topical narrative. A cursory review of this typology suggest that we've aggregated a pretty encompassing collection of commentaries on future food systems research priorities. The largest number of commentaries fit into what might be called the " sustainable systems perspective " domain (cell 4/D), while most of the other cells I