Time for mission-oriented approach to school meals

The global food system is failing on multiple fronts. With more than 2.6 billion people unable to afford ahealthy diet, over 500 million are expected to be chronically undernourished by 2030. Worse, at a time when meeting future demand requires a 50% increase in food production, food-system productivity is actually declining, owing partly to rising climate risks. Agrifood industries are not only driving biodiversity loss, land degradation, and a global water crisis, but also generating almost one-third of global greenhouse-gas emissions.

- Mariana Mazzucato

School-meal programmes could brighten this picture. Current annual spending on them stands at $84 billion (2.7 billion baht) worldwide, reaching 466 million children — an increase of $36 billion since 2022. When world leaders met in Brazil last week for the Global Summit of the School Meals Coalition, they rightly celebrated this progress. Countries from Canada to Indonesia are launching national programmes, creating one of the world’s largest social safety nets.

But school meals are about more than expanding welfare provisions. When designed properly, they represent a powerful opportunity to transform entire food systems, achieve Sustainable Development Goal 2 (“Zero Hunger”), drive economic growth, and advance climate and environmental goals. As T argue in a new report with the World Food Programme, realising this potential requires moving beyond social policy to embed school meals in industrial strategies, with procurement serving as a key lever of change.

For decades, the dominant economic-pol-icy approach has been to “fix” markets only after they have already failed. Hence, governments and international aid programmes tend to provide meals in situations of acute need, while rarely challenging the underlying incentives shaping food systems. Public procurement typically rewards low costs and risk minimisation, entrenching short-termism at the expense of a longer-term investment perspective.

The primary beneficiaries have been large agrifood corporations, with the entire sector exhibiting high levels of financialisation and concentration of market power. As a result, many children are served food that is high in calories but low in taste or nutrients, and opportunities available to local, more ecologically sustainable producers remain limited.