Resilience And Food Security In A Food Systems Context

This open access book compiles a series of chapters written by internationally recognized experts known for their in-depth but critical views on questions of resilience and food security. The book assesses rigorously and critically the contribution of the concept of resilience in advancing our understanding and ability to design and implement development interventions in relation to food security and humanitarian crises. For this, the book departs from the narrow beaten tracks of agriculture and trade, which have influenced the mainstream debate on food security for nearly 60 years, and adopts instead a wider, more holistic perspective, framed around food systems. The foundation for this new approach is the recognition that in the current post-globalization era, the food and nutritional security of the world’s population no longer depends just on the performance of agriculture and policies on trade, but rather on the capacity of the entire (food) system to produce, process, transport and distribute safe, affordable and nutritious food for all, in ways that remain environmentally sustainable. In that context, adopting a food system perspective provides a more appropriate frame as it incites to broaden the conventional thinking and to acknowledge the systemic nature of the different processes and actors involved. This book is written for a large audience, from academics to policymakers, students to practitioners. This is an open access book.

This book addresses some of the major challenges of food systems associated with a diversity of agricultural contexts and priorities. It contributes to the conversation on global food and nutrition security by unpacking the intertwined connections between food system resilience, food policies, and global food markets. The contributing authors provide careful analyses of how shocks to food systems (e.g., COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns) and crises to global food systems (e.g., the global food price crisis of 2008) have disrupted the food value chains in ways that undermine global initiatives to achieve food and nutrition security for all. The book is divided into two sections. Section 1 focuses on global food systems transformation with the goal of moving towards resilience. Two chapters in this section employ a global context approach to address the key factors undermining food systems’ resilience and sustainability. Section 2 presents case studies drawn from Africa, Asia, and Europe with different pathways for the transition to food systems resilience, highlighting the importance of policy approaches as well as smart and innovative strategies to ensure the production of nutritious foods at affordable costs, the reduction of food wastage, and the valorization of sub-products.

The resilience of food systems and security to emerging challenges and threats, especially in the context of environmental and climate risks and global pandemics such as the Covid-19 crisis, is currently gaining growing importance in research, policy, and practice. Based on this, the core focus of this book, as a part of a series of CERES publications, consists of identifiying and exploring the best ways to overcome such challenges and shocks and to build resilience in the Global South. More precisely, the book analyzes current dynamics and trends related to the climate resilience of food security and assess the relevance of emerging approaches such as climate-smart agriculture, new roles of agriculture extension, smart farming, and climate adaptation of farming systems.The book includes both conceptual and empirical research reporting lessons learned from many geographical, environmental, social, and policy settings while focusing on Africa, Middle East, and Asia. It also provides research and policy-oriented inputs and recommendations to guide change processes at multiple scales.

The food systems concept has attracted a considerable amount of attention as it provides an opportunity to better understand and represent the array of factors that explain food security in a comprehensive and holistic manner. The value-added proposition of food systems resilience is that the ability to respond to shocks and stressors may be incorporated into such explanations. The qualities that make food system resilience attractive, however, also make it difficult to model in empirical terms. This paper, by drawing on the literatures of food systems and on the measurement of resilience, demonstrates how food systems resilience can be measured at a country level. Clustering countries into regions shows that North America and Oceania have the highest levels of food systems resilience, followed by Europe and North Africa and Western Asia. Food systems resilience is lower in Latin America and the Caribbean and South Asia and sub-Saharan countries exhibited the lowest levels of food systems resilience. In low- and middle-income countries, increasing market resilience plays a significant role in increasing overall food systems resilience.

As part of the work implemented by CGIAR on COVID-19, the COVID-19 Research Hub Working Group 4 “Address food systems’ fragility and build back better” was tasked with implementing a global assessment of the impacts of COVID-19 on food systems and their actors, focusing specifically on the consequences that the pandemic had brought on the food security and nutrition of those who have been affected by the crisis. This includes formal and informal actors of the food supply chains (from producers to street vendors) as well as consumers, in both rural and urban environments. Building on this assessment, the task was then to draw on key principles of resilience in the context of humanitarian and food security crisis, to identify preliminary elements of a food system resilience research agenda.

In this paper we undertake an analytical review of the extant literature on the building food system resilience. While the concept of food system resilience has become a topical issue in global and national policy discussion, there is little research on how to develop operational procedures to design and implement interventions from the food system and resilience perspective. This review identifies five major entry points to strengthen food system resilience in the national context: policy, institutions, technology, capacity, and governance. Measurement issues and analytical approaches to studying food system resilience are reviewed. We conclude that while there is a large gap in the methodological approaches to study the food system resilience, beginning with the case studies of understanding specific elements of a food system and their role in enhancing resilience would be good starting point for addressing thematic issues, challenges and constraints facing resilience of the food systems.

Armed conflict combined with prolonged drought has put about 20 million people at risk of starvation and death in Somalia, South Sudan, Yemen, and northern Nigeria. The international development and aid communities are caught between the enormity of the humanitarian crisis, which demands an estimated US$4.4 billion to address, and the lack of resources forthcoming from donors. Food crises, famine-like conditions, and famines recur with regularity in many developing countries (see Box 1 for definitions of terms). Although the current famines can be largely attributed to conflicts, chronic food insecurity also threatens several other African countries. For example, 6.7 million people were affected by Malawi’s largest food crisis in decades in 2016–2017, and the country remains vulnerable to weather extremes that could create food emergencies (World Bank 2017). In Kenya, food security has deteriorated since the end of 2016 and half of its 47 counties face food shortages (Chatterjee and Mengistu 2017). How do countries prepare to prevent shocks—natural and man-made—from generating food crises? What does it take to break the cycle of chronic food insecurity and build resilient food systems? How have some countries managed to prevent drought from leading to famine? In this brief, we document lessons for building resilient food systems to prevent future famines.

As part of the work implemented by CGIAR on COVID-19, the COVID-19 Research Hub Working Group 4 “Address food systems’ fragility and build back better” was tasked with implementing a global assessment of the impacts of COVID-19 on food systems and their actors, focusing specifically on the consequences that the pandemic had brought on the food security and nutrition of those who have been affected by the crisis. This includes formal and informal actors of the food supply chains (from producers to street vendors) as well as consumers, in both rural and urban environments. Building on this assessment, the task was then to draw on key principles of resilience in the context of humanitarian and food security crisis, to identify preliminary elements of a food system resilience research agenda.