UBI and equitable food systems
Image credit - Nikola Jovanovic
A staggering 2.4 billion people globally are food insecure. Individuals and households across food systems, from farm to fork, can’t afford nutritious food even though there’s a worldwide surplus. Our food systems are clearly not delivering for everybody. Amid calls for food system equity, and the fact that people who are currently earning their livelihoods in food systems are among the most economically vulnerable, the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit was held to kickstart system transformation as part of the Decade of Action to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
The summit created five ‘action tracks’ to guide this transformation:
Ensure access to safe and nutritious food for all
Shift towards sustainable consumption patterns
Boost nature-positive agriculture
Advance equitable livelihoods
Build resilience to vulnerabilities, shocks and stress
The fourth track focuses on improving equity within food systems by eliminating poverty and ensuring people’s resilience and empowerment. It works to achieve this by promoting full and productive employment and decent work for all people in the food value chain, enabling entrepreneurship, addressing the inequitable access to resources and distribution of value, and improving resilience. These actions would be complemented with social protections to ensure nobody falls through the cracks.
While the proposed actions are praiseworthy, these still fixate on employment, targeting and conditional measures. More ambitious and human rights based approaches are needed to make transformative changes. One such action that could advance equitable livelihoods and build resilience to vulnerabilities, shocks and stress for everybody in a dignified way is a Universal Basic Income (UBI). UBI is a guaranteed regular payment to every individual in society, regardless of their income, wealth or work.
Over the past few years, UBI has gained interest in both the public and political debate as a solution to poverty and its social and psychological consequences. More recently, UBI has been debated and evaluated as part of a fairer and more equitable food system by the UK Food Ethics Council. They judged UBI to be a powerful idea with the potential to deliver significant net benefits for both society and the food system. In their view, UBI has the potential to transform individual lives and the food system more widely.
But the evidence on the potential effects of a UBI on those who earn their livelihoods within the food system is currently limited. While it’s unrealistic to fully capture the complexity of the interaction between UBI and food systems of various scales, shapes, and sorts in this blog, we can hypothesise as to how a UBI could advance equitable livelihoods and build resilience more effectively among those active in the food system due to its universality, unconditionality, stability and focus on the individual.
The fact that a UBI is paid to individuals rather than households could allow it to play a major role in advancing equitable livelihoods across the food system. Evidence from multiple trials around the world shows how a UBI can empower vulnerable individuals and improve nutrition, alongside other positive impacts. This will be particularly beneficial for women, who are among the most food insecure and who are more likely to earn their livelihoods in the food system. An independent income would not only increase the agency of the consumer, but also give individuals a genuine choice about whether to engage in farming or any other food system activity. The current system of targeted support instead maintains or further fuels power imbalances within households, as this is often directed to the male head of the household.
Due to its universality, a UBI could ensure that every person who earns their livelihood within the food system is covered, including those in hard-to-reach areas. This is contrary to targeted cash transfers, which are often ineffective, stigmatising and don’t reach everybody. Furthermore, the stable and unconditional nature of a UBI would provide material and time security, especially in contexts where both food producers and consumers are struggling with food price volatility or climate-induced disasters such as floods and droughts. Such factors mean many people don’t have time to wait for targeted, conditional protection. This is especially true of small-scale farmers in low and middle-income countries, whose incomes and nutrition are especially vulnerable to the seasonal and to changing market prices for farming inputs (such as feed).
It’s important to note that a UBI should not be considered a panacea for solving inequity (and other issues) across the food system. For example, a basic income cannot directly solve the problem of high land prices that food producers have to deal with. It may also not resolve all the issues related to physical food access, especially in areas with limited transport. Here, other structural solutions are required.
Instead, it could be an essential component of a wider set of policies that encourage more appropriate agricultural practices and further lower economic and social pressures. To echo the Food Ethics Council, more work needs to be done to develop our understanding of the relationship between a UBI and our food systems. Not only to shape fairer, more equitable systems, but also to understand how they may contribute to both the production and consumption of sustainable and nutritious diets.
At UBI Lab Food, we’d like to draw more attention to the relationship between UBI and food systems. We would like to advocate for food, nutrition and wider food system indicators to be incorporated in future UBI trials, or future permanent UBI policies. It’s essential to capture and represent voices and experiences from those most vulnerable across the food system. With this Lab, we’ll be striving to do so.
A UBI could well be a game-changer for everyone earning their livelihoods within food systems, and it could make these systems fairer and more equitable.
The potential of a UBI on food insecurity was discussed during the UBI Lab Food launch event on May 12th, 2022 13-14:00hrs BST.
You can watch the discussion again: Watch here
Remco Peters - @rpjpeters
Remco is a Research Associate at the University of Bristol. Previously he did his doctoral studies in global health in the Nuffield Centre for International Health and Development at the University of Leeds.
He has worked researching migration, obesity, and food insecurity for nearly 5 years. His current research interests focus on social determinants of health and systems thinking approaches to malnutrition.