Resilience in Food Systems

A blog is not really long enough to answer these questions (that is if I would even dare to claim that I have the answers to these questions). But I want to use this blog to provide some food for thought about the issue at hand¡­ In ecological terms, resilience is defined as: ¡°the capacity to recover quickly from a disturbance¡±. But what does that mean for ¡°food systems¡±?

What are food systems?

Food is an everyday necessity for us, providing us with the energy and nutrients we require to survive and be healthy. It can also provide us pleasure (remember the chocolate I talked about in a previous blog) and an opportunity for social exchange and recognition; but it can cause social tensions and wars too, when there is too little of it to go around.

But there is a lot more to food than just the eating. Food needs to be produced, processed and transported, often all over the world: this requires the input of natural resources, and causes the output of polluting emissions. Both of these can lead to the degradation of the natural environment. But food also generates livelihoods and income for many people, from farmers to restaurant owners. So, we want to sustain our food systems, no matter what disturbance.

A rocky ride for food systems

Food systems are in for a rocky ride in the coming years. For example, we¡¯ve all heard about climate change, and how that may affect agricultural production of food in the future. We¡¯ve also all heard about globalization, and how that has changed the access people have to food, but also to the means to produce food (such as seeds, fertilizers and capital). These are just two examples of disturbances, which affect how well our food system is working, and how good the outcomes are for humanity (or not).

So, we have to ask questions like: will our growing population still have enough food to eat under the predicted future climate? Will multinational food manufacturers provide us with enough healthy food or should we rely on small farms (see blog by Dr. Jaboury Ghazoul)? Will poor farmers be able to buy expensive seeds and earn enough to feed their families? Predicting the answers to such questions is hard because of the way food is produced, distributed, and consumed and because the many drivers affecting those processes form a highly complex system that is awfully hard to model.

Food systems resilience through adaptation and transformation

One way of increasing our ability to predict is, however, by ¡°increasing the resilience¡± of food systems. From the above, it is evident that resilience in food systems means that the food systems can adapt and transform themselves in such a way that no matter what the future looks like, they can still produce enough healthy food to which everyone has access, avoid environmental damage, and contribute to livelihood generation. But how do we instill this? That¡¯s the million-dollar question.

Nevertheless, there is a pathway that we can follow. First of all, we need to map and understand food systems, then we have to design feasible interventions. We need to verify that the interventions minimize negative feedbacks, and lastly we need policies that help food systems to help themselves (and help us). One way to guide the whole process is by using indicators of resilience, such as the degree of self-organization and regulation within the systems, the spatial and temporal heterogeneity among the interconnected systems, the complexity, redundancy, and diversification of food chains within a food system, etc. We need a lot of investigation and elucidation of how food systems work and can be modified for a sustainable future.