The challenges of sustainable food systems where food security meets sustainability - what are countries doing?

The evolutionary history of the concepts of food security (FS) and sustainability have run in parallel for many years. After the food crisis of 2008, stability was added to definition of FS as a short-term time dimension to express the ability to withstand shocks to the food system caused by natural or man-made disasters. We have proposed that sustainability be added as a fifth long-term time dimension, thus bringing together FS and sustainability. In 2015, the United Nations described the seventeen sustainable development goals. We believe that FS involves all the goals to a greater or lesser extent. The challenge ahead is to build and integrate FS on the sustainability agenda and vice versa. The final common pathway for all these efforts is for countries to develop their most appropriate sustainable food systems. As a practical exercise towards this aim, we have reviewed what eight different countries (United States, Brazil, France, Greece, Spain, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and the Scandinavian nations) are doing regarding their food systems. We have compared their programmes according to an operational template for recommendations for Israel based on eight consensus criteria.