At the Food Planet Prize, a new chapter for food, systems, and survival
The future will be written in the soil. The Food System—how we grow, distribute, and consume what we eat—is one of the biggest forces driving the planet away from liveable conditions. It’s also one of the best levers we can pull to turn things around.
That’s the premise behind the Food Planet Prize: 2 million USD every year, awarded not for what’s been done, but for what could still be done. Big ideas. Scalable solutions.
Now, as the Prize enters its next chapter, the torch is passed between two very different but deeply aligned leaders. Johan Rockström, the Swedish Earth systems scientist who helped define the revolutionary science of planetary boundaries, spent five years laying the Prize’s foundations as its founding Co-Chair. His successor, Lindiwe Majele Sibanda—a Zimbabwean farmer, scientist, and institution change expert—is bringing the grounded urgency of someone who has lived the stakes firsthand.
The work of both leaders revolves around a simple but radical truth: if we don’t fix food, we don’t fix anything.
The Foundations
When Johan Rockström first heard about the Food Planet Prize, it struck him immediately as something different—and critical. Despite having a very full agenda as director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, he was all in. “As a climate scientist, an Earth systems scientist, with my past in global hydrology and food system research—when you look at the risks we’re facing at the planetary scale, there are two transformations that have to occur with urgency,” he says.
“All focus tends to be on the energy transition,” he says. “But the second one is the food system transition. They’re equally urgent, but the food system has so much less attention to it.”
Rockström’s broad overview of the data drives his convictions. ”The food system is the largest consumer of fresh water, the largest cause of loss of biodiversity, the largest cause of eutrophication because of nitrogen and phosphorus overloading, the single largest sector emitting greenhouse gases if you include methane and nitrous oxide,” he says. “[It’s] one of the main really big causes for risk at the human level locally, but also at the planetary level.”
The true innovation of the Prize since its founding was its ambition to shape the future, not just celebrate the past. “It was a bit of a crazy idea from the start to have a prize larger than the Nobel Prize,” he says. ”[But] it’s a big difference to do what the Nobel Prize does, which is to select winners for accomplishments that have been achieved, compared to do what the Food Planet Prize does, which is to identify winners who can achieve something transformative in the future.”
The pressing nature of the quest was never far from his mind. ”The food system is not only threatening the health of the planet,” Rockström says, ”it’s threatening the health of humans.”
Early Lessons From the Farm
Lindiwe Majele Sibanda’s earliest education in sustainability came in the rhythms of Zimbabwean farm life. “The tradition in Zimbabwe is that your parents work in the city,” she says. “But no child spends the school holidays in the city. You go back to the rural areas, the village where your parents were born, and you stay there.” So she and upwards of 20 cousins would pile into her grandmother’s farmhouse, where they would spend a month at a time, three times a year. “Every school holiday, one goat was slaughtered,” she says. “And we each got a piece every day for one of the meals, carefully measured to last the 30 days we were there.”
This austerity taught her an important lesson about the value of resourcefulness and also planted an early ambition. “I vowed… when I grow up, I’ll have my own farm, and I’ll produce my own goats,” she says with a laugh. “And I’ll eat as much meat as I want.”
It turns out she eventually did get her goat, with the help of an elite academic trajectory. “I had a scholarship to do dentistry, [but my father] said, ‘You’re not going.’ Within a month, I got another one to study agriculture… and the goat thing was still with me.”
Fast-forward to doctoral work in animal sciences at the University of Reading, researching with goat herds back in Africa. She wrote her dissertation on nutritional interventions that dropped mortality in pregnant and nursing goats from 50 percent to 10 percent. The villagers in Matabeleland South where she did her groundbreaking research took to calling her “the woman in overalls.”
On the policy front, a few highlights of her post-doctoral career: she grew the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network into a 19-country, multimillion-dollar continental network backed by numerous funders including, the Gates Foundation, the Africa Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF), the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, and the Australian Center for international Agriculture Research (ACIAR). She co-chaired the Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture. She chaired the CGIAR System Board. She sits on Nestlé’s board and serves on the Sustainability Committee and Creating Shared-Value Council.
Through it all, Sibanda never left her close personal connection to agriculture behind. She has been farming her own land for 30 years now, including, of course, goats. “It’s a passion,” she says. “If I’m not at Mahembe farm for a month, I think my blood pressure goes up. It’s a place where I really find peace.”
Now with her elevation from jury member to Co-Chair of the Food Planet Prize, she brings her rooted perspective to the global stage in yet another forum.
Searching for Scalability
Both Rockström and Sibanda understand how hard it is to scale local success into global impact. Many of the Food Planet Prize nominees are inspiring—but often small, hyper-local, and hard to replicate elsewhere.
”It has been more challenging than we thought to really find scalable solutions,” Rockström says. ”It’s not as if [they] are just standing out there ready to just put some money behind.”
Sibanda takes the example of reducing methane that comes from livestock “because it’s 80 times more potent than the carbon and it stays in the atmosphere longer than the carbon.” There are possible technological remedies, but it takes something like the Food Planet Prize to make them widely available to farmers. “For us to show that we can take them to scale, make them accessible and affordable, that’s where the Prize comes in,” she says. “Anyone can do research and come up with novel solutions. But for as long as they are blue sky and not a product that will take us closer to sustainable food systems, they are good for publication but not for impact.”
Global impact continues to be the goal, says Rockström: ”It has to be scalable solutions well beyond a geographic region or an economy or a country.”
One of his favorite winners of the Food Planet Prize during his tenure was 2020’s recipient The Land Institute, which is developing perennial staple crops—plants that don’t need to be replanted every season. Perennial, deeper-rooted versions of wheat, rye, maize, and teff, wouldn’t require annual plowing, says Rockström, which would reduce carbon pollution from the constant plow-and-replant cycle, and would create much more resilient farming systems. “That’s a 100 percent scalable solution,” he says. “Whether you are in Nigeria or in the northeast part of China or in the US, you would benefit from that kind of breakthrough.”
Another favorite was 2024 winner C40 Food Systems, the network of mayors tackling urban food systems. ”We have 70 percent of the world population living in cities,” Rockström says. ”They don’t produce their own food. They are consumers, massive generators of food waste. How do you close the whole cycle of biomass that enters the cities and needs to exit the cities in ways that return nutrients to farmers’ fields?”
The scale is necessary to meet the overwhelming urgency of the moment, he says. “I’ve never had reason for deeper concern in my whole professional life than today,” says Rockström. “This is, if anything, the darkest moment in my professional life. And of course that has to do both with the scientific risks and all the evidence we have of being so close to causing irreversible, potentially unmanageable changes to the life support on Earth, but also the geopolitics in the world. So exactly at the moment when we need to accelerate the transition away from risk, we are backtracking.”
“So the mood is somber. But I should say, people handle this very differently,” he says. “The way I handle it is to just be even more filled with positive adrenaline… if anything, I get even more active.”
In his transition from the Food Planet Prize chair, he is aiming that positive adrenaline at one huge new project, the Planetary Boundary Initiative. Part of this initiative is the Planetary Health Check, harnessing satellite data to create real-time health checks for Earth’s systems, in partnership with global political, scientific and cultural leaders. The Planetary Health Check is, says Rockström, no less than “a mission control center for planet Earth.”
The Next Chapter
The respect between Rockström and Sibanda is evident. He considers himself grateful and somewhat surprised, given her many endeavors, that she was able to accept the new position. And Sibanda admires Rockström’s outsized efforts in defense of the Earth. “My goodness, whatever he does, he gives it his whole heart,” she says. “Nothing he ever does is small.”
But Sibanda is also looking forward to putting her own mark on the Food Planet Prize. “I enjoy institutional reform,” she says. “When I move into something, I move into it because I want to change something… I like to rethink in terms of why me and what will I do to leave it better than I found it. [There’s] always something unique about your own persona, your own passion.”
Among her top priorities for the Prize moving forward is awareness. “I still feel the Prize, for being the biggest reward for shifting toward a sustainable food system, is not well known,” she says. “We need to be more creative in terms of spreading the word.” It’s unique in being a self-nominating prize, which means that worthy nominees can come from any region or any sector, and do not need the usual patronage or connections to be considered. They just need to know the Prize exists. The more nominees, the better chance at finding and supporting that unique solution that can have global effects.
And if that happens, the Food Planet Prize can be more than an award. It can be a catalyst.
by Nathan Thornburgh
Photo: David Ausserhofer/Pik and Gulshan Khan
