What would it really take to fix the global food system? A new study in Nature has the numbers.
A major new study published in Nature — one of the world’s most influential scientific journals — offers the most detailed picture yet of what a genuine transformation of the global food system would mean for agriculture worldwide. The paper, “Food systems transformation would reshape global agriculture,” was led by researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Cornell University, working with ten global economic modelling teams — including scientists from IIASA (the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis), home of GLOBIOM.
Why this matters
Food systems drive around a third of global greenhouse gas emissions and are a leading cause of us breaching planetary boundaries. Poor diets are also one of the biggest risk factors for early death worldwide. Everyone agrees food systems need to change — but until now, nobody had mapped out, in detail, what that change would actually mean for farms, farmers, and food markets across the world.
This study fills that gap. It simulates a global shift to the EAT–Lancet 2.0 healthy diet, combined with higher farm productivity and a 50% cut in food waste, and compares it against a “business as usual” path to 2050.
The headline findings
The results show a genuine restructuring of agriculture, some of it without precedent in recorded history:
Global agricultural land could shrink by up to 6% compared with 2020 — the largest absolute reduction in over 2,000 years, driven by 400 million fewer ruminant animals (cattle, sheep and goats) worldwide. Livestock production value would fall by 42% ($630 billion) compared with 2020, while the value of vegetable, fruit, nut and legume production would rise by 57% ($890 billion). Agriculture-related net-CO2 emissions from land-use change could fall by 85% by 2050 compared with today.
The impacts vary enormously by region. US agricultural output would fall overall, but its crop sector would grow while livestock shrinks sharply. India’s agricultural economy would expand significantly, led by crops. Europe would see an overall decline, concentrated in livestock.
Crucially, the authors are careful to frame these as scenario projections, not predictions — a guide to where the pressure points and opportunities lie, not a forecast of what will happen.
The trade-offs are real
The study doesn’t shy away from the hard part. A shift of this scale would mean serious disruption for farmers and rural economies built around livestock, and it would collide with powerful commercial interests that benefit from the status quo. The authors argue this is exactly why bold, deliberate policy choices are needed now — to manage those trade-offs fairly, rather than letting the costs fall on the most vulnerable producers and consumers by default.
Set against this, the potential upside is substantial: healthy diets adopted globally could prevent 15 million premature deaths a year, and current food systems are already estimated to carry $10–20 trillion a year in hidden health and environmental costs.
CHOICE's experts role in this work
This research was made possible by an ensemble of ten global economic models, including GLOBIOM, developed and run by our partner IIASA — one of the Integrated Assessment Models at the heart of the CHOICE project. GLOBIOM’s contribution to this landmark multimodel effort, led by IIASA researchers Petr Havlik, Amanda Palazzo and Marta Kozicka, was supported in part by CHOICE, reflecting exactly the kind of real-world, policy-relevant impact our project aims to enable: using IAMs to reveal what food system transformation would actually mean for people, farms and markets.
This is one of the most comprehensive looks yet at the agricultural consequences of a healthy, sustainable food future. We’d encourage anyone working on food policy, climate, or agriculture to read it in full: Food systems transformation would reshape global agriculture — Nature (2026)
