There is growing recognition in food systems thinking that justice isn’t simply a goal to arrive at, but rather what makes transformation possible in the first place. Changes that ignore power imbalances generate resistance, and technical answers, no matter how well-designed, struggle to become relevant when the communities they’re meant to support had no hand in shaping them.
I introduced four dimensions of food justice in an article earlier this year: distributional justice, which asks who gets what, who bears what cost, and how benefits and burdens are shared; recognitional justice, which asks whose knowledge and identity counts; procedural justice, which asks who gets to participate in decisions with real power; and restorative justice, which asks what past harms need to be acknowledged and repaired before trust is even possible. Each does specific, irreplaceable work. But when pressed on what justice actually requires, the instinct is almost always to focus on distributional justice alone, and treating it as the whole picture leaves the foundations of fundamental food system change weak.
A practitioner workshop led by the AFN Network+ earlier this year applied a justice framework to UK food system transformation pathways and worked through these dimensions and their implications in conceptual detail. A WWF report and French civil society initiatives demonstrate what turning concept into practice looks like, together illustrating equity-driven approaches across eight countries. Putting these together helps show where in the world people are already building practical responses to each dimension and highlights some instructive tensions and gaps. This article maps those responses.
First, make injustice visible
Before you can act on any of the four justice dimensions, you need to make existing injustice visible in ways concrete enough that they become impossible to ignore. The current system is anything but equitable.
A 2024 study by a coalition of civil society organizations calculated the cost of the French food system to society. They found that of the €67 billion in annual public spending on food and agriculture, €19 billion goes not to supporting the system but to compensating for the damage it causes to health, social wellbeing, and the environment. Meanwhile, farmers receive just 70 cents out of every €10 spent on food, down from €1.80 in the 1960s, while five supermarket chains control over 80% of all food sales.
The UK picture is structurally similar. Farmers and households are squeezed from opposite ends of the food chain, while grocery retail is dominated by a small number of very large players. A 2024 report from the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission estimated that food-related ill health costs the UK £268 billion a year, including healthcare, social care, welfare, lost productivity, and reduced quality of life. By contrast, ensuring everyone could afford a healthy diet would cost an additional £57 billion. In other words, we are spending more than four times as much managing the consequences of the current system as it would cost to make it work better.
Distributional equity, by design
Quantifying the costs makes injustice visible; acting on those figures is where distributional justice begins. But what does that kind of justice look like when someone tries to bake it into policy?
Brazil’s National School Feeding Programme offers one of the clearest answers in the international evidence. Enshrined in law in 2009, the programme mandates that at least 30% of school meal purchases come from family farms, redirecting public money simultaneously towards children in underserved communities and smallholder farmers who would otherwise be excluded from institutional markets.
The design is explicitly distributional in two directions at once: improving food access for those who need it most, and improving market access for those most marginalized in the supply chain. Indigenous and traditional farming communities, previously excluded due to documentation requirements, gained access through a parallel platform that simplified administrative barriers and ensured that procurement included culturally appropriate food. In 2023, 57% of programme participants in Brazil’s north were farmers from Indigenous or traditional communities.
The scale of this work alone is impressive, but the clarity of design is most instructive, with a legal mandate, a deliberate effort at multi-directional redistribution, and governance structures that involve the communities it serves.
Changing who decides, not just who’s consulted
Distributional justice focuses on outcomes—who gets what, who pays. Procedural justice, in contrast, is about changing who decides. The first obstacle is that common engagement approaches are not designed with everyone in mind. As explored in a previous article, participants at the AFN workshop identified how standard engagement processes, such as working groups, consultations, and formal hearings, systematically exclude the people most affected by assuming a level of availability and access that doesn’t exist.
The civil society organizations behind the French true-cost analysis took this problem seriously. They’ve developed practical facilitation tools to reach people experiencing food insecurity on their own terms. A four-session programme starts from the participants’ own experience. The first session maps personal food journeys over time; the second collectively charts the food landscape of their neighbourhood. A third uses a card game that draws on study data to open up system-level questions without requiring any prior policy knowledge. The final session uses a débat mouvant, or “moving debate”, in which participants physically position themselves in the room to evaluate proposed solutions, whether from official reports, civil society, or the group itself.
The concept underlying this is démocratie alimentaire: that people have both the right and the means to shape the food system they live in, and the process must be organized to ensure that the people the system has systematically failed are the ones evaluating what change should look like.
Such participation needs to run all the way into governance, not just consultation. In the French city of Montpellier, a community food fund has built this fundamentally into its decision-making structure. Four hundred citizens contribute according to their means, and the entire system is governed by a citizen committee of 47. A particular effort has been made to ensure that people experiencing precarity are meaningfully represented within it as decision-makers, not merely consultees. Other French cities and towns are now following the same model.
Expanding whose knowledge counts
Procedural justice ensures people can participate; recognitional justice asks whose knowledge counts. This shapes everything that follows, including which problems are defined and how, which solutions are funded, and whose experience counts as evidence. The AFN workshop found that participation without recognition reproduces existing hierarchies in a polite form, which is a pattern explored in detail in the earlier article. The international evidence shows what it looks like to break that pattern.
The WWF report highlights MASIPAG, a network of farmers, scientists, and NGOs in the Philippines working to make recognitional justice concrete. Founded in 1986, the network supports over 50,000 smallholder farmers in managing their own seed systems and agricultural practices. More than 700 traditional rice varieties have been recovered and conserved; more than 2,000 farmer-bred lines have been developed, freely shared, and adapted to local conditions.
The network directly contests the assumption embedded in Green Revolution logic and still dominant in national policy that valid knowledge about food production is industrial, expert-owned, and proprietary. MASIPAG’s participatory certification system, which involves farmers, community members, and other local actors in validating food standards, is more than a logistical workaround to expensive third-party processes—it asserts that farmers’ knowledge and judgment are authoritative.
The Seikatsu Club in Japan offers a different expression of the same logic. It’s a women-led cooperative with some 350,000 members that has built a food system in which producers and the people who buy their products together decide on product standards, production methods, and pricing. The WWF report notes that the Club advances recognitional equity by challenging the structural invisibility of small-scale producers, women, and community-based actors within dominant food systems by creating space for members to act as civic leaders and policy advocates in ways that conventional food system governance does not.
What’s required before trust is possible
Restorative justice, which is about acknowledging the harms done to specific communities and building mechanisms for repair, is the justice dimension for which the evidence is most revealing in what it doesn’t contain.
Scotland comes closest. The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2025 addresses concentrated ownership and the public interest, including promoting more diverse and community ownership. The connection between the Highland Clearances and present-day land concentration is increasingly acknowledged in the wider land reform debate in ways that have no equivalent in food policy anywhere in the UK. Food and land policy in Scotland are still largely separate domains. But what’s happening in Scotland points in the right direction.
On the international stage, there is a further lack of examples of restorative justice in practice. One reason may be that questions of historical dispossession and the redistribution of ownership routinely meet resistance, even among people who accept the other three dimensions. That was the candid insight from one of the WWF report authors in a LinkedIn exchange about the four justice dimensions. That candour is itself instructive: deep knowledge of food justice identifying its frontier.
The AFN workshop found that restorative justice was needed most clearly in two places. The first was related to land: participants identified enclosures, Irish clearances, and colonial dispossession as direct explanations for present-day land concentration, and explicitly called for acknowledgement rather than just policy adjustment. The second was the relationship between farming communities and government, which was described, without qualification, as broken. Participants were clear that without repairing that specific relationship, with its history of incentive reversals, ignored expertise, and eroded trust, procedural processes would simply reproduce the same exclusions. Restorative justice in this context is about relational repair as a precondition, not a byproduct, of progress.
Three models and the frontier of food justice
This article takes the dimensions in their familiar order, starting with distributional justice, where most people instinctively decide to intervene. But the evidence suggests they depend on each other in a way closer to the reverse: Brazil’s procurement programme works in part because governance structures give communities procedural power. Facilitation tools and community food funds developed in France show what building that procedural power requires: going to where people are and giving them a role in decision-making. In the Philippines, MASIPAG’s seed systems are viable because farmers’ knowledge has recognitional authority. And the communities who most need transformation often carry the longest histories of harm; unless that is addressed, the trust that every other dimension requires simply isn’t available.
In other words, distributional outcomes that last are built on participation, which requires recognitional shifts and which, in turn, may depend on restorative work that has barely begun.
The AFN Network is now working to develop approaches to restorative justice in UK food system pathways. It is the hardest dimension to operationalize, and the most consequential to get right. Are you working on justice for food systems transformation? Please share your stories.re generations who will depend on the systems we build now.
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