Unlocking investments for food systems transformation

Hello everyone and welcome!

I am Lucia Palmioli, your moderator for this discussion room focused on Unlocking investments for food systems transformation. I look forward to hearing your ideas, strategies, and practical experiences on how to unlock investments and support food systems transformation.

You can respond to the questions in any order. Please, remember to indicate the organization you represent and the question number you are addressing in your comment.

You are also welcome to respond in any language of your choice by clicking the language button on the top right of the page; the platform will automatically translate it.

Thank you for being here, and let’s have a rich and constructive discussion!

Hi Lucia,

Thanks for opening up the floor for comments—this is shaping up to be a really insightful piece of work, and it’s great to see such a broad range of initiatives featured in the food systems space.

I just had one minor comment regarding the representation of the ClimateShot Investor Coalition (CLIC) in Chapter 4. The current wording may give the impression that CLIC directly disburses blended finance, which isn’t the case. We’d suggest rephrasing this to reflect our role in supporting the investor-readiness of climate- and nature-positive agri-SMEs, rather than providing capital ourselves.

One of our core programmes, the Agrifood Investment Connector, provides tailored technical assistance and investment facilitation to agri-SMEs in Africa and Latin America. This includes business support to strengthen their investment readiness, as well as independent impact assessments to better articulate their climate and nature outcomes. These efforts aim to build a stronger case for finance and connect SMEs with aligned investors.

In addition to the Connector, CLIC also convenes Action Groups that bring together investors and ecosystem stakeholders to collaborate on priority topics like innovative financing (e.g., guarantees, insurance, etc.) and evidence-based tools. We complement this with Knowledge Products that offer data-driven insights on climate finance for agrifood systems—our most recent being The Landscape of Climate Finance for Agrifood Systems 2025, released earlier this month, which maps public and private flows and identifies key funding gaps.

Happy to provide further detail or suggested edits if helpful.

Best regards,
Harsha

Selon l'analyse de la sécurité alimentaire du Cadre Harmonisé de mars 2024 publiée par le Comité permanent inter-Etats de lutte contre la sécheresse dans le Sahel (CILSS), près de 55 millions de personnes en Afrique de l'Ouest et du Centre auront du mal à se nourrir pendant la période de soudure de juin à août 2025. Dans la Corne de l'Afrique et au Sahel, des millions d'enfants souffrent de malnutrition et d'émaciation sévères. Pourtant, de 65 % à 70 % de la population vit de l'agriculture, de l'élevage ou de la pêche. De quoi rappeler que le potentiel de souveraineté alimentaire est là. Nous devrions mettre l'accents sur les quatre piliers de la sécurité alimentaire sont la disponibilité, l'accès, l'utilisation et la stabilité. La dimension nutritionnelle fait partie intégrante du concept de sécurité alimentaire et des travaux du CSA (document sur la réforme du CSA, 2009) et trouvé des financements durables. 

In my region, many grassroots and youth-led initiatives face barriers in accessing funding, especially for long-term or systemic food systems work. The complexity of donor platforms, lack of grant-writing capacity, and a focus on short-term outputs often leave impactful local efforts unsupported. 

There’s also a mismatch between donor priorities and local needs. Integrated projects that connect climate resilience with livelihoods often don’t align with rigid donor categories. More flexible, cross-sectoral funding approaches are needed to reflect the true nature of food systems transformation.

Thank you all for your insightful and thoughtful contributions so far.

I’ve seen a variety of perspectives and approaches to this discussion:

• A concrete example from the ClimateShot Investor Coalition, highlighting their role in building investment readiness

• A contextual remark from West Africa, emphasizing the link between agricultural potential, food sovereignty, and the role of sustainable funding (I've asked for more details and examples on this).

• A call for more flexible, cross-sectoral funding approaches, from a grassroots perspective, to truly reflect the integrated nature of food systems transformation.

These different angles all point to the complexity and interconnections that define food systems work.

I warmly encourage everyone to keep sharing your experiences—no matter how detailed or nuanced they may be. Concrete examples, challenges you’ve faced, or strategies that worked well are all valuable. Don’t hesitate to elaborate or be “long-winded” if you feel it helps highlight what really matters.

Your inputs will ensure this chapter captures a diverse, grounded view of how to unlock investments that are truly aligned with local realities and the systemic nature of food systems transformation.

Thanks!

Sara Dastoum, Senior Scientific Researcher at Sciensano – Belgium
Response to Q1 & Q2

In my experience conducting independent assessments of food industry practices (via the BIA-Obesity and BIA-Sustainability tools), one of the most systemic funding barriers has been the complete absence of public or donor investment in accountability infrastructures. While billions are channeled into agricultural development, climate-smart supply chains, or nutrition programming, there is virtually no earmarked support for civil society or research actors who track corporate influence, commercial determinants of health, or conflicts of interest. This has created a two-tier system: one where implementation is funded, but evaluation and accountability are expected to happen on volunteer time.

For example, our multi-year monitoring of major food companies in Belgium—including product reformulation, marketing to children, and environmental commitments—was conducted with limited institutional support, no core budget, and zero national uptake. Despite high policy relevance and public interest, we were never able to access EU or national funding streams because our work did not fit into agricultural, clinical, or innovation categories. The framing of “transformation” remains biased toward production-side interventions, leaving systemic governance work unfunded and unsupported.

This reflects a deeper misalignment: donors still prioritize output-based, project-bound logic, while food systems transformation requires political analysis, critical monitoring, and structural challenge. Cross-cutting work—especially that which questions vested interests or pressures governments—often falls through the cracks of existing funding schemes.

To address this, I suggest the following:

• Create dedicated funding lines for accountability work, including policy monitoring, industry assessments, and watchdog initiatives;

• Streamline application and reporting processes for small organizations, especially those working on intersectional or systems-level change;

• Diversify evaluation metrics so that policy influence, structural impact, and movement building are valued alongside service delivery;

• Decenter innovation fetishism: transformation is often framed as technological or investment-driven, while political economy, regulatory reform, and civic capacity remain invisible or undervalued.

Until we address the structural bias in funding architectures, local and civil society actors will continue to be engaged as symbolic voices in dialogues—rather than supported as systemic agents of change.

Question 1: Funding accessibility challenges

Our experience: GFN and the foodbanks have identified significant barriers in mobilizing funding for food systems transformation. As documented in our questionnaire, we face particular challenges including lack of awareness and access to networks, limited availability of funding opportunities, mismatched expectations of funders, and lack of institutional capacity to develop financing proposals. Despite GFN's proven impact in reducing food loss and waste while simultaneously working to reduce hunger, we struggle with financing mechanisms that artificially separate environmental from social goals.

Making funding more accessible:

• Develop robust impact measurement frameworks that quantify multiple benefits (environmental, social, and economic) of food recovery initiatives, particularly methane reduction from prevented food waste
• Create blended finance mechanisms that combine philanthropic, public, and private capital to de-risk investments in food recovery infrastructure
• Position food banks within social and climate finance frameworks by demonstrating their contribution to methane reduction and linking to countries' NDCs
• Simplify eligibility criteria for climate finance that adequately recognize emissions reductions achieved through food waste prevention

Concrete support needed:

• Training programs on financial sustainability for food bank networks
• Technical assistance in developing MRV (Monitoring, Reporting, Verification) systems that capture GFN's multidimensional impact
• Capacity building in grant writing and proposal development specifically for food recovery organizations
• Support in connecting food banks with strategic buyers of carbon credits

Question 2: Donor-reality misalignment

Our experience: GFN faces a persistent disconnect where donors and funders often operate with funds specifically allocated to either climate or health interventions, but rarely recognize the intersection of these domains that food banks perfectly represent. Despite clear evidence of GFN's impact on public health, food security, and methane reduction, there's insufficient recognition of our work to reduce hunger while simultaneously addressing climate goals through reducing food loss and waste.

Better alignment strategies:

• Advocate for policy reforms that create fiscal incentives for businesses and financial institutions to invest in food recovery and redistribution systems
• Build cross-sectoral coalitions with health, climate, and social welfare stakeholders to access funding pools not traditionally tapped for food security initiatives
• Demonstrate how GFN's work addresses multiple SDGs simultaneously (particularly goals 2, 12, and 13) through standardized methodologies like our FRAME methodology
• Establish formal mechanisms so that progress in reducing food loss and waste is reflected in voluntary national SDG reports

Question 3: Climate finance accessibility

Our experience: GFN has found that despite the significant potential of food banks to contribute to both food security and methane reduction, eligibility criteria for climate finance are complex and often do not adequately recognize the emissions reductions achieved through food waste prevention. Our FRAME methodology demonstrates substantial methane emission reductions, yet we struggle to access climate financing mechanisms.

Why this happens:

• Technical barriers in demonstrating and quantifying methane reduction from food waste prevention
• Bureaucratic complexities in climate finance eligibility criteria
• Lack of recognition that reducing food loss and waste through food recovery simultaneously addresses climate and social objectives
• Knowledge gaps about how food bank operations contribute to climate mitigation

Improving access:

• Develop standardized methane emission reduction metrics specifically for food recovery operations that meet climate finance requirements
• Create simplified pathways for food recovery organizations to access carbon markets and green bonds
• Establish GFN as a strategic partner in climate finance mechanisms, connecting food banks with buyers of carbon credits
• Integrate food recovery into NDCs and social financing programs, recognizing the dual benefit of reducing hunger while achieving methane reduction
• Support pilot insetting models that allow companies to invest directly in GFN's food recovery operations to meet their climate commitments

A specific expectation is the formal recognition of food recovery and redistribution as strategic climate interventions, with concrete commitments to include food loss and waste reduction in national climate strategies and financing mechanisms. 

Developing standardized impact measurement frameworks—such as the FRAME methodology for methane reduction—can enable food recovery organizations to access climate finance mechanisms and be recognized within countries' Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

Food recovery organizations face particular challenges as financing mechanisms artificially separate environmental from social goals, despite food banks representing perfect examples of multi-dimensional interventions that simultaneously address hunger, improve nutritional outcomes, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions

ATNi would like to stress the role of both institutional and impact investors, to support food systems change and unlock new investment opportunities. Institutional investors are a key actor group to both push for greater accountability in the food system, by demanding better disclosures on companies impacts on health and environment, but can also be agents of change to mobilize capital for nutrition outcomes. Paris Declaration - Paris Declaration on Business and Nutrition 2030, launched at the Nutrition for Growth event in Paris (March 2025), outlines a roadmap for realigning business incentives and investment flows towards a more equitable and nutrition-focused food economy.

Impact investors also provide an opportunity to leverage funding for companies investing in products and services that support human and planetary health outcomes. Linked to the previous chapter, mechanisms to screen companies and independently assess their impacts on these outcomes (such as the ATNi Global Access to Nutrition Index for nutrition outcomes) are essential for evaluating companies seeking to access impact investments.

In my experience this is true donors rarely take account of local realities and the multiple disparate situations. To often funding is short term and rarely takes a long term perspective.

One exception is the Forest and Farm Facility, this is over 20 years old. It provides direct financial support and technical assistance to strengthen forest and farm producer organizations representing smallholders, rural women’s groups, local communities and indigenous peoples’ institutions. It is partnership between FAO, IIED, IUCN and AgriCord, funded by  Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, Finland, the United States of America, the Netherlands and IKEA.

It is key that we identify a new approach to finance and food systems – Systemic investing. How can we use finance to encourage a systems approach? Currently it is not, and money is being incentivised to be spent poorly. A systemic approach will be slower to set up than most of the short term approaches but it will save money in the medium term.

We need to monitor and report on how and where money is being spent, this is rarely done. If this improved we could identify the real gaps, not the supposed ones, and understand what donors are prioritising and why.

Climate finance does not currently reach local communities, farmers or fishers. A concerted effort is need to change this, with donors and UN bodies working to ensure the far more goes to LDCs, and indigenous people’s and local communities, in urban and rural contexts.

WFP underlines the report's findings that current funding landscapes, especially in complex and crisis-affected contexts, are heavily skewed toward short-term emergency interventions. While humanitarian responses are essential in crisis settings, long-term investments in food systems transformation and resilience are equally critical to enable recovery, support the transition to sustainable solutions, and reduce reliance on humanitarian assistance. 

Many crisis-affected countries have developed national strategies aimed at strengthening resilience and transforming national food systems, but face significant challenges in accessing financing that aligns with the integrated and long-term nature of these efforts. Investor risk aversion and the prevalence of short-term or earmarked funding further limit system-level interventions. 

Therefore, WFP calls for a stronger emphasis in the report on unlocking investments for food systems transformation in complex contexts, calling for a shift in how resources are structured, accessed, and deployed. This includes: 

• Creating food systems investment platforms and mechanisms for food systems transformation in complex and protracted crises settings to align public, private, and donor investments in long-term food systems transformation.  

• Mobilizing long-term, flexible financing – including blended, shock-responsive and adaptive, and locally-led finance – for scalable, catalytic, transformative, and sustainable food systems solutions , moving beyond short-term emergency interventions to reduce reliance on humanitarian assistance, and build lasting stability. 

• Integrating food systems strengthening into existing emergency response funding to enable early recovery and resilience-building as part of crisis response, recognizing the catalytic role of humanitarian assistance in transforming food systems, including through local procurement and cash-based transfers.  

• Promoting pooled, coordinated funding, such as multi-donor trust funds or food systems investment platforms, aligned with national food systems priorities. 

• Simplifying application and reporting processes, as well as providing capacity-building support such as proposal-writing training, pre-financing, and advisory services. 

• Promoting joint planning with donors and governments based on local needs, supporting integrated, multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder approaches.  

WFP is stepping up collaboration with governments, partners, the Rome-based Agencies and the private sector to co-design funding mechanisms and forge strong partnerships. This responds to the strong call from governments affected by food insecurity and recurring food crises for more coordinated, inclusive, and long-term investments in food systems transformation.