Educational strategies globally are changing from an authoritative, top-down model to one focused on greater student and stakeholder participation in planning and implementation of research and educational activities. In addition to emphasis on student-centered education, strategies currently evolve to encompass learning organizations and multistakeholder learning networks. These are essential to address the complexity and scope of tomorrow\'s challenges, involving issues that could be called \'wicked problems\' not easily addressed by single disciplines nor resulting in solutions that please all the players. In this study we describe how a transformative innovation - the NEXTFOOD educational approach - may contribute substantially to a transition of agricultural and food education and how it can be developed and diffused within and between teaching institutions. The method was action research informed by several workshops organized at annual consortium conferences during the first three years of the project. The findings show that a successful transformation involves learning both within and across innovation projects repeated at various organisations in a network. The action research model presented in this paper may be useful as an instrument to support the facilitation of transformative innovations. The transition process resulted in substantial changes in mindset, educational practices and organisational structures at the teaching institutions. However, scaling-up promising educational initiatives may encounter several barriers that need to be overcome at individual, group and institutional levels, and we provide insight on how this can be accomplished in a multi-national consortium of universities.

Increasing knowledge of the microbiome has led to significant advancements in the agrifood system. Case studies based on microbiome applications have been reported worldwide and, in this review, we have selected 14 success stories that showcase the importance of microbiome research in advancing the agrifood system. The selected case studies describe products, methodologies, applications, tools, and processes that created an economic and societal impact. Additionally, they cover a broad range of fields within the agrifood chain: the management of diseases and putative pathogens; the use of microorganism as soil fertilizers and plant strengtheners; the investigation of the microbial dynamics occurring during food fermentation; the presence of microorganisms and/or genes associated with hazards for animal and human health (e.g., mycotoxins, spoilage agents, or pathogens) in feeds, foods, and their processing environments; applications to improve HACCP systems; and the identification of novel probiotics and prebiotics to improve the animal gut microbiome or to prevent chronic non-communicable diseases in humans (e.g., obesity complications). The microbiomes of soil, plants, and animals are pivotal for ensuring human and environmental health and this review highlights the impact that microbiome applications have with this regard.

Eradicating world hunger-the aim of Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG2)-requires a social-ecological approach to agrifood systems. However, previous work has mostly focused on one or the other. Here, we apply such a holistic approach to depicting the global food panorama through a quantitative multivariate assessment of 43 indicators of food sovereignty and 28 indicators of sociodemographics, social being, and environmental sustainability in 150 countries. The results identify 5 world regions and indicate the existence of an agrifood debt (i.e., disequilibria between regions in the natural resources consumed, the environmental impacts produced, and the social wellbeing attained by populations that play different roles within the globalized agrifood system). Three spotlights underpin this debt: 1) a severe contrast in diets and food security between regions, 2) a concern about the role that international agrifood trade is playing in regional food security, and 3) a mismatch between regional biocapacity and food security. Our results contribute to broadening the debate beyond food security from a social-ecological perspective, incorporating environmental and social dimensions.