Towards a post-G20 Agenda for Food Security and Climate Resilience
Beyond South Africa’s G20 Food Security Task Force
The global food security crisis cannot be addressed through trade openness, emergency responses or technical coordination alone. Food security depends on much more than whether food is available in global markets. It is shaped by production systems, incomes, ecological conditions, public investment and the ability of states and communities to shape their own food systems.
For many developing countries, trade liberalisation has weakened local production, increased dependence on imports and intensified vulnerability to global price volatility. At the same time, free trade, financialisation and fiscal austerity have contributed to declining wages, insecure work, inequality and weaker prospects for inclusive development.
This discussion paper examines the experience of South Africa’s G20 Presidency and its Food Security Task Force, asking what it can teach us about building a more ambitious agenda for food security and climate resilience beyond the G20.
From the G20 to a broader agenda
South Africa’s 2025 G20 Presidency placed food security, food price volatility and climate resilience firmly on the international agenda. The G20 Task Force recognised that food insecurity is driven by interconnected pressures, including climate change, geopolitical shocks, trade disruption, financial instability and structural weaknesses in food systems.
But the process also exposed significant differences between countries over how these challenges should be addressed.
Developed countries generally emphasised open and predictable trade and market transparency. Many developing countries instead highlighted the importance of domestic policy space, public procurement, public stockholding, national food distribution systems, price stabilisation and action against excessive corporate power.
While the G20 process achieved some important advances, its outcomes remained cautious and limited in their ability to address the deeper structures of trade, finance and corporate power that shape food systems.
The paper argues that the momentum created by South Africa’s Presidency should not end with the G20. It should become the basis for a broader development agenda centred on food security, food sovereignty and climate resilience.
A developmental approach to food security
Food security requires a transformation of the economic policies that shape how food is produced, traded, financed and distributed.
This means moving beyond the assumption that global markets will automatically move food from surplus to deficit regions. Trade can contribute to food security, but it must be embedded within a broader development framework that strengthens domestic production, protects livelihoods, supports incomes and gives governments and communities the policy space to build resilient food systems.
For countries across the Global South, food security and sovereignty can provide a practical basis for renewed South-South cooperation, particularly when connected to trade, finance, technology, democratic participation, income distribution and public investment.
Four priorities for a post-G20 agenda
The paper proposes four interconnected policy domains for building food security, food sovereignty and climate resilience:
- Finance and price stabilisation: Reducing vulnerability to global financial cycles through financial regulation, regional buffer stocks, liquidity support, emergency currency arrangements, clearing mechanisms and collective procurement of agricultural inputs.
- Fiscal policy and public investment: Investing in food production, storage, transport, processing, distribution, research and public institutions. Food reserves can serve not only as emergency mechanisms but also as tools to support smallholder farmers, diversify production and strengthen domestic value chains.
- Income distribution, productivity and employment: Connecting food policy with employment creation, agricultural development, labour absorption and fairer income distribution. Productivity gains must not come at the expense of livelihoods, wages or care systems.
- Climate change and agricultural transformation: Building climate resilience into agricultural development, infrastructure, public procurement, research, technology, water management and land-use strategies, while drawing on agroecology and other sustainable approaches and protecting rural livelihoods.
Together, these priorities provide a framework for moving from crisis management towards long-term transformation.
Recognising the people who sustain food systems
Food systems are sustained not only by markets, infrastructure and investment, but by the paid and unpaid labour that makes them function.
Much of this work is carried out by rural and working-class women, whose contributions are often undervalued or invisible in conventional food and economic policy.
A transformative food security agenda must recognise, value and fairly reward this labour. It must also ensure that the people who produce, distribute, prepare and sustain food have a meaningful role in deciding how food systems evolve.
Building regional solutions
The challenges facing African food systems cannot be addressed by individual countries acting alone.
The paper proposes that the principles of this agenda could provide a foundation for stronger regional coordination, including the establishment of a regional food management agency in Southern Africa.
Such an institution could support regional food reserves, coordinate price stabilisation, facilitate collective procurement of inputs, strengthen infrastructure and distribution systems, support smallholder farmers and monitor food, macroeconomic, climate and social resilience.
Regional food cooperation could also be linked to financial arrangements that reduce dependence on scarce foreign exchange and enable regional trade imbalances to contribute to development finance.
South Africa’s opportunity
South Africa is well positioned to help advance this agenda.
Its G20 Presidency demonstrated its ability to place the priorities of developing countries on the global agenda and build coalitions around food security and climate resilience. The next step is to extend that momentum beyond the G20 through regional and global institutions.
This includes working through the African Union and the African Continental Free Trade Area, while building wider coalitions through groupings such as BRICS.
South Africa’s leadership is particularly important because it embodies the contradictions at the heart of the global food system. It is a significant agricultural producer and exporter, yet continues to face persistent hunger, stunting, inequality and a highly concentrated food system.
Beyond the G20
The G20 Presidency created a limited but important political opening for a different approach to food security.
The challenge now is to move beyond cautious international commitments towards regional institution-building, stronger public investment and a broader transformation of the economic rules governing food systems.
A resilient food system cannot be built through markets alone. It requires public institutions, decent livelihoods, ecological sustainability, fairer distribution of resources and meaningful democratic participation.
The post-G20 agenda should therefore be about more than responding to the next food crisis. It should be about building food systems that are more equitable, more resilient and capable of securing the right to food for all.