Fix My Food: Children's Views on Transforming Food Systems

Sustainable food systems are critical to ensuring that all children and adolescents are able to access nutritious, safe, affordable, and sustainable foods. However, current food systems are failing children and adolescents. Globally, two out of three young children do not consume a diet of minimal diversity and three in four adolescents in low-income and middle-income countries do not consume enough fruit and vegetables. At the same time, in the same settings, children and adolescents often have ready access to cheap, nutrient-poor processed and ultra-processed foods. Urgent action to radically transform food systems and deliver on children’s right to good nutrition is needed. UNICEF partnered with the Young and Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University to bring the voices of children to the forefront through participatory food systems dialogues in 18 countries around the world. Over 700 children and adolescents aged 10-19 from significantly diverse backgrounds participated in two-and-a-half-hour workshops to share their lived experiences, insights, and perspectives on food systems. The workshops help understand children’s views and perspectives on food systems; the key challenges to attaining nutritious, safe, desirable, and sustainable food; and how children want food systems to change. Additionally, UNICEF conducted U-Report polls involving 22,561 children and youth in 23 countries who reported on their experiences of food systems and food environments. Workshop findings exposed how children are knowledgeable about the importance of food and what it means to them and their communities. They understand how food is produced and how it travels from farm to mouth. They are clear about the main barriers – physical and financial – to nutritious, safe, and sustainable diets and are concerned about the links between current food systems, environmental degradation, and climate change. U-Report data demonstrated that cost and safety of food (32%) followed by taste (25%) were the biggest influence on food choice. During workshop activities children expressed a strong desire to be engaged in dialogue and action to transform their food systems and to address food poverty, food quality, environmental degradation, and climate change. Children voiced two key recommendations to aid food system transformation 1) improve the availability, accessibility and affordability of nutritious foods; and 2) reduce the impact of food systems on environmental degradation and climate change. Children call on political leaders and public/private-sector stakeholders to work across all levels of society to strengthen food systems; from implementing effective regulation of food industries to promoting individual and community behaviour change. Doing so will support people to sustain themselves while also sustaining the environment. Children call on governments and other stakeholders to work with them during this process to create platforms for their ongoing participation in the process of food systems transformation.