Now is the time to build sustainable food system resilience

Food system resilience is the capacity over time of a food system and its units at multiple levels, to provide sufficient, adequate and accessible food to all, in the face of various and even unforeseen disturbances.

It is both complementary and essential to sustainability.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of our food system, not just across Europe, but across the world. Oxfam warns that 12,000 people per day could die from Covid-19 linked hunger by end of the year — that’s potentially more than the disease. The global observed daily mortality rate for COVID-19 reached its highest recorded point in April 2020 at just over 10,000 deaths per day.

‘COVID-19 is causing us a lot of harm. Giving my children something to eat in the morning has become difficult. We are totally dependent on the sale of milk, and with the closure of market[s] we can’t sell the milk anymore. If we don’t sell milk, we don’t eat.’ — Kadidia Diallo, a female milk producer in Burkina Faso (Oxfam, 2020).

The climate crisis is also increasing food insecurity in all the hunger hotspots. Higher average annual temperatures, more extreme weather events such as droughts and floods, and less predictable weather patterns spell disaster for food production. Projections indicate that climate change will negatively impact crop yields in many parts of the world and increase food prices. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) also estimates that up to 183 million additional people could face hunger by 2050 due to climate change.

In addition to health, there are key connections between our globalized food system and its impact on biodiversity and ecosystems.

Agricultural biodiversity is essential to satisfy basic human needs for food and livelihood security. Biodiversity, food and nutrition interact on a number of key issues. It contributes directly to food security, nutrition and well-being by providing a variety of plant and animals from domesticated and wild sources. Less biodiversity means that plants and animals are more vulnerable to pests and diseases. Compounded by our reliance on fewer and fewer species to feed ourselves, the increasing loss of biodiversity for food and agriculture puts food security and nutrition at risk.

Resilience

The idea of rebuilding resilience runs through three main sustainable food systems themes: governance, regional infrastructure and reducing waste.

Governance

Institutional strengthening and good governance on disaster risk reduction and crisis management are crucial to reduce increasing levels of disaster risk and manage the impact of shocks. Governance is highly locally contextualized based on production capabilities and the sociopolitical relationships that influence distribution networks. The challenges and opportunities for fostering food system links across scales depend on local context and political pressure to develop these tailored policies

Regional Infrastructure

Achieving resilience in the food system may require efforts to counter the concentration of the global production of an increasingly narrow set of crops in key export-oriented agricultural regions (Kastner et al. 2014) by sourcing food from multiple scales of distribution and diverse markets and supporting polycentric loci of decisionmaking.

Regionalisation can be designed as the clustering of local food production and distribution activities to leverage greater access to infrastructure, resources, and/or markets.

Reducing Waste

Although food is lost throughout the supply chain, it’s estimated the greatest losses occur at the consumer level in the global north. In addition, a large amount of produce is wasted for not meeting retail cosmetic standards. All of the energy towards production, transportation, and processing of this food is also wasted. This modern culture of waste must be addressed. (Oxford Martin, 2019).

The impact of food governance by environmental groups and consumer groups has already been increasing, and they are focussing on issues such as environmental protection, food safety, locally sourced food, corporate power, disadvantaged communities, world hunger, fair trade, diet and health (Lang and Heasman, 2015). If this momentum can be maintained, the involvement of consumer and environmental groups may help address some of the questions raised as to who is in a position to make informed decisions about food and accountability (Catherine Price, 2020).