As part of the roundtable, “Ethics and the Future of the Global Food System,” this essay discusses some of the major challenges we will face in feeding the world in 2050. A first challenge is nutritional: 690 million people (9 percent of the world's population) are currently undernourished, while 2.1 billion adults (28 percent of the population) are overweight or obese. The current global food system is insufficient in ensuring that the nutritious foods that make up healthy diets are available and accessible for the world's population. Moreover, by 2050, as the global population increases, food demand will increase by 50–60 percent. A fundamental challenge is meeting this demand while not wreaking irreversible havoc on natural resources, the environment, and planetary systems. A body of scientific research has coalesced around the need to reduce food loss and waste, adopt environmentally sustainable production practices, and shift toward plant-dominant diets. Other long-standing food system problems include deficits in providing fair wages and decent working conditions for food system workers, threats to smallholder farmer livelihoods, and tens of billions of animals kept in welfare-deficit confinement conditions. These food system challenges are bad states of affairs that matter from a variety of moral perspectives. In other words, there is a robust moral case for addressing these challenges. Yet concerted policy action in this area is insufficient and largely absent, pointing to the underlying challenge and complexity of political inertia.

The complexities of the global agri-food system and the singular importance of food as a primary good elevate the need to explore what corporate social responsibility (CSR) might mean for agri-food firms. Although CSR refers to voluntary actions on the part of capitalist firms to exceed legal and regulatory requirements, those requirements are important because they set the institutional foundation for what a firm must do to earn the CSR label. In the case of CSR for agri-food firms, the institutional context includes the regulatory state as well as the publicly supported agricultural and food research and development that tends to be done at universities. The purpose of this paper is to provide greater conceptual clarity to the blur between the state, agri-food firms, and universities and their respective responsibilities to the public. Since the globalization of the agri-food system and the emergence of private forms of governance signal the decline of the state's legal and regulatory influence on corporate firms, we pay particularly close attention to the ethical challenges that have surrounded university–agribusiness collaborations—initiatives, which conjoin the moral concerns associated with each respective institution while also raising new questions in their own right. Although the university would ideally play a critical participatory role in this process by virtue of its public commitments, as we explain, the historical relationship between the university and agri-food firms has complicated the university's potential standing as an independent arbiter. Upon examining each of these issues in greater detail, we conclude the paper with a blueprint for how universities can enhance their ethical leadership when engaging with agri-food firms.