The current global food system has detrimental outcomes for global health, environmental conditions and social inclusion. A coherent vision of a desirable food system can guide a sustainable food system transformation and help to structure political processes and private decisions by quantifying potential benefits, facilitating debates about co-benefits and trade-offs, and identifying key measures for desirable change. Such a transformation requires integrating measures targeting human diets, livelihoods, biosphere integrity, and agricultural management. Here, we apply a global food and land system modeling framework to quantify the impacts of 23 food system measures by 2050. Our multi-criteria assessment shows that a food system transformation can improve outcomes for health, the environment, social inclusion, and the economy. All individual measures come with trade-offs, particularly those targeting agricultural management, while few trade-offs and multiple co-benefits are linked to dietary change measures. By combining measures in packages, trade-offs can be reduced and co-benefits enhanced. We show that a sustainable food system also requires a transformation of the overall economy to stop global warming, reduce absolute poverty, and create alternative employment options. Within the context of a cross-sectoral sustainable development pathway, the food system transformation improves 14 of our 15 outcome indicators.

Weather extremes and high population growth are challenging the achievement of SDG 2 Zero Hunger in West Africa. However, future food security scenarios are often based on models that ignore annual weather variability and weather extremes. As a result, this approach also disregards the risk of having lower than expected yields, with adverse consequences for food security and farmer livelihoods. Here we present a stochastic food production model to show how optimal crop allocations change depending on food security risk targets. To guarantee stable livelihoods for farmers, we examine the viability of a contingency fund that supports farmers in the event of low crop yields. Applied to the West African context, accounting for weather variability can substantially improve the reliability of the food supply and boost the fiscal sustainability of a contingency fund. Yet, setting reliability targets for food security is costly and leaves high residual risk in certain regions. Spatial risk-sharing through regional cooperation at the West African scale can eliminate the risk of insufficient food supply and further enhance the fund solvency without additional cost.