It’s a familiar ritual at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Conference. On the 8th floor patio in Rome—once Mussolini’s Colonial Ministry—someone inevitably invokes the adage, if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. But today’s global food system is clearly broken—and the 80-year-old U.N. agency meant to lead the response, FAO, is no longer fit for purpose.
The word broken has become shorthand for many of the crises of our time: climate change, biodiversity collapse, global trade dysfunction, and strained health systems. But the food system is not just caught up in these converging crises—it sits at their center. Hunger and malnutrition continue to rise, development aid is being slashed, and food is increasingly being weaponized in wars and conflicts. The Right to Food remains under constant threat.
FAO has struggled to mount a coherent international response. Its original mandate has been fragmented across multiple agencies. Internal reviews have failed to confront structural inefficiencies. Key functions are now duplicated, diluted, or lost in institutional overlap. Corporate partnerships with agrochemical and agribusiness companies have raised concerns about conflicts of interest, undermining FAO’s independence and credibility, and blurring the line between its public mandate and private-sector influence.
If FAO is to claim a meaningful role in shaping food system transformation, deep and far-reaching reform is essential.
It’s encouraging, then, to see FAO’s Council Chair, Hans Hoogeveen, initiate a full organizational review to ensure that FAO “becomes fit for purpose” in the challenging decades ahead. An initial evaluation is expected in December 2025, with a two-year process culminating at the 2027 FAO Conference. As part of this, member states will establish working groups to explore key areas where reform is most urgently needed.
Reform takes time. But one thing is clear: this cannot be just another internal review. Like many U.N. bodies, FAO already has an Office of Evaluation. But its reviews rarely assess how effectively agencies work together—or whether their mandates overlap. That’s a serious omission.
Since the 1970s, the original scope of FAO’s work has splintered across several agencies—including the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Food Programme (WFP), and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Each of these now runs its own programs, governance, and fundraising—often with overlapping goals and competition over the same resources.
Over time, these bodies have expanded far beyond their original roles. CGIAR, for example, has moved from crop and livestock research into economic policy, rural development, and community-based programs—rebuilding tools and capabilities that already existed in FAO. The same is true for IFAD and WFP. This mission creep means that several agencies are now operating in the same policy spaces, duplicating functions, fragmenting responsibilities, and creating confusion about who is ultimately accountable for what.
Worse still, past attempts at reform have failed. Since the 1990s, CGIAR has been through near-constant restructuring—without ever re-examining its relationship with the U.N. food agencies. The latest overhaul led to scandals, senior resignations, and allegations of millions of dollars in wasted costs, while up to 40 percent of its budget goes to administration and fundraising.
The problem extends well beyond CGIAR. IPES-Food’s Long Food Movement report, estimated that up to US$1 billion could be saved by reducing redundancies and improving collaboration between U.N. food agencies. One of the new working groups should review how mandates are shared—and where better alignment could reduce costs and improve outcomes.
But the FAO review must go further than institutional housekeeping. It should examine how effectively FAO is fulfilling its normative role—facilitating international regulatory agreements on trade, finance, pricing, food aid—and whether these efforts genuinely advance food sovereignty and the Right to Food.
Just as crucially, the review must confront FAO’s growing partnerships with agrochemical and agribusiness companies—and ask whether these align with its public mandate—or undermine it.
There are also opportunities to build on existing cooperation. Over the past 30 years, FAO, WFP, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food have quietly worked to uphold food rights in global trade talks. Often sidelined and criticized by some states, their persistence has earned respect—and shown what joint action can achieve.
The success of this review process will hinge on who gets a seat at the table. Member states and the FAO Secretariat must open the door to broader participation—including civil society voices through the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism, and the U.N. Inter-Agency body covering food and agriculture across 30 U.N. entities. These perspectives are essential to set the right terms of reference – and to ensure reform tackles the root problems, not just the symptoms.
Yes, institutional overhaul is difficult, especially when multilateralism is in retreat and development aid is drying up. But that is no excuse for inertia. The working groups should take inspiration from the inclusive reform of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) 15 years ago—a process that showed how shared ownership and public accountability can reinvigorate global governance (though which must now be revived).
As FAO marks its 80th anniversary, this review may be the best—and last—chance to get it right. If it fails, the cost won’t just be institutional. It will be measured in lives lost to hunger, and food systems left to the chaos of the growing crises they must now confront.
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Photo courtesy of Micah Camper, Unsplash
