Throughout the five chapters of this book, we have highlighted three important facts that now have a wide social recognition. First, for a long time, food consumption in the world was mainly guided by culture, traditions and the material possibilities of each territory. As time passed, and especially during the last thirty or forty years, food production and consumption have evolved thanks to technology and population growth. Now, they respond to more uniform global guidelines, which are transmitted and spread through trade, the communication media and migration. Second, the modernity and, in particular, the growing globalization of food trade have created a vast global food system comprising numerous productive chains, private companies and economic processes. This global food system produces food in response of the effective demand of the almost 8 billion global consumers in existence. Third, this vast production and consumption system must, on the one hand, ensure an ample food supply and, on the other hand, safeguard the production system to avoid any potential risk to the planet’s scarce natural resources or to the consumers’ health.
This evidence suggests the need for collective action at a global level to monitor and promote, in a conscious and deliberate manner, the future evolution of the global food system. To make this possible, it is necessary to rely on a global organizational component, capable of complying with certain technical and political functions to build consensus and establish the agreement required to perform fair and balanced collective actions.
On the other hand, it is also evident that the reorganization of the roles and functions of international organizations towards a more systemic and harmonic view of regional and global food systems and subsystems must have some correlation with the institutionalism in member countries. Only that way will it be possible to provide the necessary coherence and effectiveness to food policies at a national, regional and global level.
The global organization proposed in Chapter V should be the central element of a global governance system in charge of promoting the development of a global food system, looking into the future and including the five dimensions/attributes described in Chapter III in a fair and balanced manner.
