Resilience and Food Security in a Food Systems Context

Table of Contents

1. Frontmatter

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2. Chapter 1. Resilience, Food Security and Food Systems: Setting the Scene

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   Christophe Béné, Stephen Devereux

   Abstract

   The aim of this introduction chapter is twofold. First it will set the scene, frame the overarching problem and present the central question of this volume: How does the concept of resilience help in improving our general understanding of the development process, in particular around the issue of food (in)security, and how does it influence the way development interventions around this question of food security are now programmed and implemented? To address this ambitious question, the entire series of chapters will adopt a food system approach. The second part of the introduction chapter will then ‘kick-start’ the discussion, first by providing some initial element of definition for the three concepts under consideration and then by highlighting some of the main discussions, debates or even contradictions that emerge in the literature around the definition, interpretations and application of those concepts.

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3. Chapter 2. Achieving Food Security Through a Food Systems Lens

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   Jessica Fanzo

   Abstract

   Achieving food security for the global population of 8 billion will be a challenge without functional, equitable, and resilient food systems. This chapter examines the history of how food security has been framed and addressed in international development, and the importance of a food systems approach and mindset in tackling food security. While this new food systems framing is important in bringing together the myriad of actors and components that food touches upon, food security has become more complex in the modern, challenged world, and functional food systems do not necessarily equate to improved food security. As international goals and commitments are made, policymakers must consider how food systems engage with other systems, and the failures and successes that history has taught us in efforts to achieve food security for all.

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4. Chapter 3. The Global Food System is Not Broken but Its Resilience is Threatened

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   Patrick Caron, Ellie Daguet, Sandrine Dury

   Abstract

   The global food system is not broken. Apart from specific contexts, access to food has never been so easy as it is today. The global food system has been resilient and able to adapt during the twentieth century to many shocks and stressors such as an unprecedented population growth. The huge increase in production has exceeded the demographic growth. Together with the expansion of trade, they have been key in ensuring food system resilience of most countries, including those with limited resources. Yet, a profound transformation is needed for the following reasons: (i) food is today the major problem in public health, (ii) the economics of food chains fuel inequalities, and (iii) food systems are responsible for major environmental and climatic damage. Numerous calls for engaging in such a transformation highlight the need for a paradigm shift. However, despite such shared observations and alerts, no “great transformation” is taking place, for different reasons, including conflicts of interest. Resilience of food systems in the twenty-first century can thus be considered a property that is constrained by past transformation. Resilience depends on the ability to change the very drivers that made food systems resilient in the twentieth century.

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5. Chapter 4. Food Security and the Fractured Consensus on Food Resilience: An Analysis of Development Agency Narratives

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   Karl-Axel Lindgren, Tim Lang

   Abstract

   The published narratives on food resilience of 16 development agencies are analysed. Using a rapid appraisal method, their positions and conception of resilience as a factor in food security are scrutinised. The study provides a snapshot of thought in 2020 and 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, biodiversity loss and a policy focus on food systems have made resilience prominent in food policy. Firstly, concerns are raised that resilience may follow food security in its plasticity, blunting its critical edge. Secondly, the methods are explained. Thirdly, the findings are presented and organised by agency type. Fourthly, the findings are discussed. A fractured consensus around food resilience is noted. Despite broad agreement that resilience is a useful dimension for food security, there is no mutually agreed systematic conceptualisation or framework. Agencies use different definitions, approaches and measurements in their discourse, with varying levels of complexity. Some agencies adopt resilience as a buzzword, while others make it central to their institutional approach. The chapter concludes that, although resilience is emerging as core concept, its value would be strengthened with interdisciplinary attention paid to how food resilience is measured; unless this occurs, the risk is that resilience will be diluted as it becomes ubiquitous.

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6. Chapter 5. Food Security and Resilience: The Potential for Coherence and the Reality of Fragmented Applications in Policy and Research

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   Mark A. Constas

   Abstract

   While the topic of food security has long been a focal point for research and policy concerned with development, resilience represents a newer area of work. Given the complexity of each topic on its own, the task of integrating the inherently multidimensional concepts of resilience and food security is an ambitious undertaking. Against this background, the present chapter was motivated by two questions: How can the integration of food security and resilience be conceptualized? What trends can be observed when food security and resilience are linked? To answer the first question, the chapter offers a new conceptual model that articulates possibilities for connecting food security and resilience. In response to the second question, a case study of selected policy documents and a sample of research was conducted. From a methodological perspective, the case study combined lexical analysis methods with a scoping review protocol. The findings from the policy review and from the research literature revealed that attempts to integrate food security and resilience were limited, inconsistent, and largely superficial. The conceptual model and the findings from the case study highlight the need for more coherent integration of work situated at the intersection of food security and resilience.

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7. Chapter 6. Food Systems, Resilience, and Their Implications for Public Action

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   John Hoddinott

   Abstract

   Linking the concepts of food systems and resilience offers the opportunity to strengthen our understanding of these concepts, the potential they hold for more informed policy discussions, and the design and implementation of interventions that will better deliver on food security outcomes. This chapter outlines how these twin concepts can be linked conceptually and empirically. It argues that while we know much about certain elements of the food system, specifically production and consumption, our understanding of the processing and distribution components of the food system are weak. For example, market structure in the processing sector and market integration can contribute to food system resilience, but these are rarely measured at a country level. This makes efforts to measure resilience at the system-level challenging. Understanding what can make a resilient food system has important implications for policy and intervention design. Building resilient food systems requires that policymakers grapple with trade-offs and tensions such as those between the benefits of diversification versus gains from specialization; and how openness to trade reduces vulnerability to domestic shocks to the food system while exposing it to external shocks. How best to manage these will be an important challenge to address.

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8. Chapter 7. Food Security Under a Changing Climate: Exploring the Integration of Resilience in Research and Practice

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   Alessandro De Pinto, Md Mofakkarul Islam, Pamela Katic

   Abstract

   Climate change poses significant risks to our food systems, thus jeopardising the food security of millions of people worldwide. The concept of resilience is increasingly being proposed as a framework to find solutions to these challenges. In this chapter, we assess how resilience has been integrated in discussions about climate change and food security by both academics and practitioners. We performed a targeted review of the academic literature on climate change, food security, and resilience and found that despite a growing body of literature on the subject, the pathways through which actions translate into resilience and then into food security remain unclear. An examination of a sample of projects implemented through the Adaptation Fund revealed that many good practices with potential for resilience-building are used but also that suitable indicators and methods to monitor and evaluate resilience and its outcomes are lacking. Based on our findings, we conclude that while the concept of resilience has accompanied and may have favoured a transition towards more integrated approaches and interventions in work related to climate change and food security, further efforts are needed to identify an efficient and rational sequence of interventions to improve food security in response to climate threats.

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9. Chapter 8. Gender, Resilience, and Food Systems

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   Elizabeth Bryan, Claudia Ringler, Ruth Meinzen-Dick

   Abstract

   Research on the gender dimensions of resilience highlights differences in the ways that men and women experience disturbances, their resilience capacities, and their preferred responses. This chapter incorporates a food systems lens into a gender and resilience framework to identify key entry points to strengthen women’s and men’s food security and nutrition in the face of multiple, reoccurring shocks and stressors. Drawing on systematic reviews and case studies from the literature, this chapter finds that exposure and sensitivity to disturbances depend largely on gendered roles in food systems, including along agricultural value chains, and the food environments in which men and women live. Increasing women’s resilience capacities—which tend to be lower than men’s—through investments in education, information and financial services, employment opportunities, and women’s agency, can improve food security and nutrition outcomes and increase their contribution to food system resilience. Considering gender differences in needs and preferences in policy and intervention design is, therefore, essential to ensure that investments reach, benefit, and empower women as agents of change for greater resilience.

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10. Chapter 9. COVID-19, Household Resilience, and Rural Food Systems: Evidence from Southern and Eastern Africa

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    Joanna Upton, Elizabeth Tennant, Kathryn J. Fiorella, Christopher B. Barrett

    Abstract

    Resilience offers a useful lens for studying how human well-being and agri-food systems absorb and recover from a range of shocks and stressors, including the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking beyond the direct effects of observable shocks to the mechanisms that shape their impacts can guide our understanding of COVID-19 and leverage findings from the pandemic to better understand resilience to future shocks. We develop a conceptual framework for the multiple paths through which observed shocks interact with systemic mechanisms to influence resilience. We illustrate this framework with reference to the pandemic and policy responses as they unfolded in three rural areas in Malawi, Madagascar, and Kenya. Consistent with this framework, we find multiple pathways through which the pandemic affected household food security and resilience. Our findings highlight that, in some settings, the direct effects—in this case severe illness and mortality from SARS-CoV-2—may impact fewer people than the indirect impacts that arise as behaviors, markets, and policies adjust. We illustrate that although COVID-19 is a new shock, its massive, broad-reaching impacts manifest through familiar stressors and uncertainties that frequently burden poor rural populations in much of the low- and middle-income world.

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11. Chapter 10. Place-Based Approaches to Food System Resilience: Emerging Trends and Lessons from South Africa

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    Bruno Losch, Julian May

    Abstract

    Food systems have outcomes related to three goals: food and nutrition security; livelihoods and economic inclusion; and environmental sustainability. Place-based approaches help to delineate the adequate territories in which coalitions of actors can address such goals. In the case of food, they facilitate food system resilience through identifying opportunities for adaptation to change and offer risk management to deal with external shocks. In many countries, local authorities and communities were central in the early response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The South African experience is illustrative of their potential roles in a time of crisis. Although South Africa’s provinces have restricted competency for food system governance, the Western Cape Province adopted a pro-active approach and developed from 2014 a food security strategy where it commits to a wide range of interventions. Related and following local debates provided a fertile context which allowed further engagement about ways to improve food governance. It facilitated the emergence of multiple community-led initiatives to address the loss of livelihoods and food insecurity during the crisis. This experience illustrates the potential to produce polycentric forms of governance that can progressively result in collaborative governance; it also reveals how embryonic territorial approaches addressing food system issues can emerge.

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12. Chapter 11. Urban Food Security and Resilience

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    Gareth Haysom, Jane Battersby

    Abstract

    The concept of resilience within urban food systems has gained significant academic and policy focus in recent years. This aligns with the increased global awareness of the problem of urban food insecurity, and increased focus on sub-national policies for sustainable development. COVID-19 demonstrated a series of vulnerabilities in the food system and the urban system. Academic work on urban food system resilience is wide ranging, however particular areas of focus dominate, focusing on urban agriculture, localized food systems, resilient city region food systems and the water-energy-food nexus. Renewed interest in resilience policy at the local government level has been amplified by global networks, whose framing of urban food systems resilience is embedded within the SDGs and the New Urban Agenda. Using findings from cities in five African countries, we argue for a re-framing of urban food system resilience that is inclusive of a wider set of factors shaping the form and function of the food system; that the urban system, specifically infrastructure, shapes the functioning of the food system and the ability of consumers to use the food system; and that the agency of urban food system users needs inclusion in understandings of, and efforts to increase, food systems resilience.

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13. Chapter 12. Reflections and Conclusions

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    Stephen Devereux, Christophe Béné

    Abstract

    The concluding chapter reflects on the conceptual, empirical, and policy-related contributions that this book has made and identifies remaining unresolved issues. ‘Resilience’, ‘food system’, and even ‘food security’ were seen to be elusive and contested concepts. A food systems’ lens is more holistic than conventional preoccupations with agriculture and food prices, by highlighting for instance the relatively neglected role of food processors in food security analysis. Global and national food systems are increasingly resilient, even against shocks like COVID-19 lockdowns, but climate change raises fundamental challenges. Moreover, paradoxes remain, such as the coexistence of high levels of undernutrition and overnutrition in countries where food systems appear to be performing efficiently. Governments, international agencies, civil society, the private sector, and local communities all have important complementary roles to play. But there are difficult policy trade-offs to negotiate: whether to promote higher crop yields or lower crop volatility, for instance, or whether to intervene in food systems by taxing unhealthy foods (e.g. sugar), which could benefit consumers but would harm affected farmers. Ultimately, at global, national, and local levels, well-functioning, sustainable and equitable food systems need to deliver not only enough food, but affordable access for all to sustainable healthy diets.

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14. 13. Correction to: Resilience and Food Security in a Food Systems Context

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    Christophe Béné, Stephen Devereux

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15. Backmatter

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