Is food system research guided by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development?

One of the top aims of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 ‘zero hunger’ is to “end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture”. While food system sustainability is a growing area of research, it remains unclear to what extent the SDG-2 targets are guiding the creation of new scientific knowledge and the publication of findings. To examine this, we assessed 97,392 publications published between 2017 and 2021 whose research results supposedly support the achievement of SDG 2. We found that the vast majority of articles had only a superficial engagement with SDG 2, suggesting a lack of interest by food system researchers in the 2030 UN agenda and a widespread practice of ‘SDG-washing’. We argue that scientists working on food systems should take better account of the SDG-2 targets and indicators in their research to identify the conditions, incentives, and supporting institutions necessary for their successful implementation.