ForumforAg Food Systems Podcast Summary

In this interview, Lauren Phillips, Director of Partnerships and UN Collaboration at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN and a political economist with a background at the London School of Economics, reflects on her forum panel about financing and accelerating agricultural transition on the ground. Lauren discusses the need for joined-up thinking across nutrition, productivity, climate and livelihoods, the challenges of climate financing for smallholder farmers, and why building durable consensus matters even when it takes longer.

Q: You laid out some of the obstacles on the panel. What was your central theme for driving progress?

Lauren said the driving force is the recognition that none of the problems facing agriculture or agri-food systems can be solved by looking at any single issue in isolation. She framed the urgency as being about channelling money to fix the system across multiple dimensions at once — nutritional outcomes, productivity, environmental and climate impact, and jobs, livelihoods and poverty — since these are deeply intertwined, and progress requires addressing them jointly.

Q: The debate in this space can often be siloed or polarised. What gave you encouragement on the panel today?

Lauren said it was encouraging simply to have climate and agriculture discussed together, since the two are often addressed separately. She noted that social elements and nutrition outcomes deserve more attention in these conversations, and said this is an area FAO is increasingly trying to integrate into its work.

Q: Kurt Vandenberghe gave the keynote from DG Climate and noted that climate change keeps changing, but it’s always heading somewhere. Is that an ongoing thread in these discussions?

Lauren agreed, noting that another speaker earlier in the day had described this as a crisis without a fixed endpoint — one that could last 100 or 200 years, well beyond our own lifetimes. She said this makes it hard to stay focused on climate amid acute, immediate crises like conflict, particularly given the growing link between conflict and hunger. But she argued these factors are all moving in the same direction: climate change is making systems less resilient, resource pressure and climate change are driving increased conflict, and hunger results from the combination of all these factors.

Q: Rising temperatures often bring rising tensions. Climate financing is a critical part of accelerating this transition, and you mentioned declining budgets.

Lauren said budgets are declining, at least as a proportion of overall spending, reflecting shifting preferences and views on where innovation is heading. She argued that simply continuing to channel large-scale development funding into climate financing isn’t enough — it’s equally important to find ways to de-risk private financing for climate action in agriculture and agri-food systems, extending down to the poorest and most vulnerable smallholder farmers.

Q: Smallholder farmers represent real complexity for this transformation, don’t they?

Lauren agreed, describing both high complexity and a high degree of risk involved in reaching smallholder farmers, but also a correspondingly high potential payoff in offsetting those risks and delivering genuine economic gains.

Q: You left the forum on a high note, with a message around the need for greater ambition and consensus. Can you say more?

Lauren said building consensus, even though it can take longer to achieve, is essential to producing durable solutions. She said that engaging with a wide range of different actors through genuine discourse leads to more lasting outcomes, and stressed the importance of investing that time in setting an ambitious target and goal, rather than settling for solutions that merely satisfy immediate demands, which she said often happens in these kinds of processes.