School feeding programmes are increasingly recognised as a transformative platform for food systems that can be delivered at scale, with multiple benefits for both human and planetary health. This potential can be achieved through different policy and operational linkages with local food production, particularly for home-grown school feeding (HGSF) models. HGSF can be defined as a school feeding model that is designed to provide children in schools with safe, diverse, and nutritious food sourced locally from smallholders. While there is some evidence on farmer income or food production, our understanding of how school feeding can contribute to climate-resilient food production is unclear. Building on empirical findings and interdisciplinary research efforts, this Personal View presents a conceptual framework designed to capture the multiple policy and operational pathways and drivers through which school feeding can drive local agricultural sustainability and climate resilience. The analysis and discussion presented in this Personal View can contribute towards developing robust interdisciplinary research approaches for generating more grounded, policy-relevant evidence to inform the development of national programmes.
Singh et al. (Sun,) studied this question.