Food Diplomacy is the strategic use of dialogue, negotiation and political coordination to manage the geopolitical dimensions, interdependencies, tensions and power asymmetries that shape global food systems — and to build the collective will to govern them in the interest of all.
The FoodDiplomacy Network provides a space to develop the concepts and approaches that food diplomacy requires. It is where policymakers, diplomats, scientists, business leaders and practitioners can work upstream, before crises force action, to shape ideas that can actually influence how food systems evolve.
The Network is built by practitioners whose careers have shaped how nations treat food as a strategic asset. Among others, Ibrahim Mayaki, Special Envoy on Food Systems for the African Union, Inaya Ezzeddine, National Food Systems Convenor of Lebanon, and José Graziano da Silva, Director General of the Zero Hunger Institute, anchor a group whose institutional depth spans continents and crises.
The Food Diplomacy Perspectives series, launching with this article, extends that work into public conversation. Through this series, we make visible the thinking that emerges from trusted dialogue, document the intellectual development of food diplomacy as a field, and amplify the voices of practitioners building new forms of cooperation across the sectors and borders that currently fragment governance.
The series aspires to establish food diplomacy as a recognized practice, distinct and necessary. It demonstrates that the people shaping food governance are already thinking differently, already seeking cross-sectoral solutions, already pushing against institutional silos. The series gives them a platform and gives the world a window into that conversation.
This reflects Impakter’s mission and the role it has sought to play since its inception: to bring expert knowledge on sustainable development into the public sphere and bridge perspectives that are often separated by institutional or disciplinary boundaries. Food systems are increasingly at the center of debates on climate change, health, trade, security, and inequality — and they are inherently cross-sectoral. Understanding and improving them requires looking beyond individual sectors and considering how their economic, political, social and environmental dimensions interact.
The series launches with the FoodDiplomacy Network Manifesto, presented below, which marked the Network’s soft launch. Over the coming months, members of the Network’s founding circle of global leaders will contribute to the series, offering perspectives on their areas of expertise, from trade and finance to climate action, nutrition security and institutional reform. In 2027, the series will open to a wider ecosystem of voices from founding partners and allied organizations.
We invite you to follow the series as it unfolds. It is a conversation that will help reshape food governance.
The FoodDiplomacy Network Manifesto
Food has always been political: ignoring this reality is what created food crises.
Food is one of the most consequential political issues of our time. It determines who holds power, who faces hunger, which nations maintain sovereignty over their most basic resources and needs and which remain permanently exposed to the decisions of others. From the COVID-19 pandemic to the war in Ukraine, geopolitical shocks have demonstrated, with devastating clarity, how rapidly they reverberate through food systems — and how deeply food systems shape the course of global events.
Yet the global response remains, at its core, a technical one. Governments reach for yield projections and supply chain metrics. International institutions negotiate within mandates designed for a different era. The deeper questions — of sovereignty, of political will, of who bears the cost of systemic failure — are treated as too difficult, too contested, too political to address directly. This avoidance is itself a political choice, and it is one with consequences.
Global food governance is currently not addressing these challenges. Not because institutions lack data or expertise, but because the frameworks through which nations interact on food were designed for a different world — one where states were the primary actors, mandates were sectoral and stable, and the boundaries between public and private power were clear. Today, non-state actors — from the private sector to civil society — are not peripheral observers: they are central to how the food system functions, and in many cases wield influence that rivals or exceeds that of governments.
Addressing this reality requires a fundamentally different approach to international engagement — one that we call Food Diplomacy: the strategic use of dialogue, negotiation and political coordination to manage the interdependencies, tensions and power asymmetries that shape global food systems, and to build the collective will to govern them in the interest of all.
The Food Diplomacy Network is not another institution, not another implementing agency. It is a space where governments, researchers and academics, civil society organisations, businesses, and those whose voices the existing system has never adequately heard can engage as genuine participants in shaping the future of global food governance — negotiating and coordinating in a new way, one that the current architecture cannot provide.
“The Food Diplomacy Network is where a trusted group of people can think across silos, say what they wouldn’t say in formal settings, and shape ideas that can actually influence how food systems evolve.”
We believe that food must become a genuine matter of state policy — elevated to the level of energy, defence and foreign affairs — and that food security, food sovereignty and sustainability are inseparable. Achieving this requires a new form of international engagement: genuinely multi-actor, politically honest, and capable of learning in real time.
Our work begins with strategic dialogue — bringing together those who shape food systems and those who bear their consequences, for the kind of conversation that formal settings do not permit. From that foundation we will build thought leadership that reframes how food is understood in global politics, and governance experimentation that tests new forms of coordination in practice.
This is an open invitation to governments, international institutions, business leaders, researchers, academics and civil society organisations, and to individuals wherever they sit — who believe that the way the world governs food systems must fundamentally change and that a different kind of conversation is not only necessary but possible.
The Food Diplomacy Network is being built now. Join us.
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by the authors are their own, not those of Impakter.com
