Nutrition Security Under Polycrisis: Governance, Ultra-Processed Foods, and the Right to Adequate Food in Sustainable Food Systems

Although the right to adequate food has been recognised for decades, the conditions for its realisation have changed fundamentally in recent years. Food and nutrition insecurity today are shaped by overlapping pressures — climate-related disruptions, conflict, displacement, food price shocks, and the accelerated reach of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) into low- and middle-income food environments. UPFs now account for a substantial share of dietary energy intake across diverse regions, while the 2020–2024 period marked the first sustained reversal in global undernourishment trends since the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals. In many communities, enough calories do not mean enough nourishment, dietary quality, or dignity. These developments expose a critical mismatch between food governance architectures still organised around caloric sufficiency and the contemporary determinants of nutrition insecurity, which are simultaneously commercial, environmental, and political — demanding integrated, accountable, and rights-based responses.

This Research Topic is scientifically timely for three specific reasons. First, the post-2022 food price crisis and recent global nutrition assessments have generated a new evidence base on how overlapping shocks erode dietary quality rather than merely caloric access — a dimension underexamined in earlier scholarship. Second, regulatory approaches such as front-of-pack labelling, fiscal measures, marketing restrictions, and school food reforms are now being implemented across diverse regions, creating, for the first time, a comparative empirical basis to evaluate governance innovations in practice rather than merely propose them. Third, the current review cycle of the Sustainable Development Goals and the operationalisation of UN Food Systems Summit follow-up mechanisms create a narrow policy window in which rights-based evidence can meaningfully inform institutional reform. Building on this momentum, this Research Topic moves beyond restating the importance of the right to food and instead asks: which governance arrangements, accountability mechanisms, and forms of collective action are demonstrably advancing — or obstructing — progress toward nutrition security and sustainable diets under current conditions? It aims to generate transferable empirical and theoretical insights across public health nutrition, food policy, human rights, and the political economy of food systems.

This Research Topic welcomes Original Research, Systematic Reviews, Policy and Practice Reviews, Brief Research Reports, and Perspective articles that offer empirical, comparative, or policy-relevant contributions; descriptive or purely normative submissions are discouraged. We invite manuscripts addressing identified research gaps, including:

- Comparative evaluations of UPF-targeted regulatory instruments (labelling, taxation, marketing restrictions, public procurement) and their distributional effects on dietary quality and equity

- Governance responses to compound climate–conflict–displacement shocks, with attention to measurable effects on dietary quality, affordability, and nutrition security

- Justiciability, monitoring, and accountability mechanisms for the right to adequate food in domestic legal and policy systems

- Commercial determinants of food environments, particularly UPF exposure, and governance counterstrategies to protect dietary quality and equity

- Institutional innovations integrating nutrition security with environmental sustainability metrics

- Civil society and community-led food sovereignty initiatives as accountability mechanisms for advancing nutrition security and sustainable diets

- Rights-based social protection and school food programmes in fragile and post-conflict settings

- Methodological advances that integrate dietary quality, rights-based access, and environmental sustainability indicators in nutrition security assessment

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Nutrition security, sustainable food systems, right to adequate food, food justice, anti-hunger action, food security, sustainable diets, dietary quality; dietary inequalities, public health nutrition, food environments, ultra-processed foods, public health

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.