Global Food System Transformation for Resilience

Abstract

Our world is incredibly diverse and beautiful, everything we do has an impact on the environment, and our actions are intertwined. Recognizing how our actions affect the Earth on a global scale means, we need to change the way we do things. We must ensure that the value society derives from our actions comes at a low cost to the environment. A sustainable strategy to establish a resilient food system is to ensure that human demand for the Earth’s resources for food is kept within the supply of these resources. While more than 800 million people worldwide suffer from chronic malnutrition, our food systems emit roughly a third of all greenhouse emissions. Also, over 80% of our biodiversity gets lost. Hence, scaling up food system is simply not an option to feed nine to ten billion people by 2050 as we will need to produce more food in the next four decades than all of history’s farmers have harvested in the last eight thousand years. Therefore, rather than upscaling, the global food systems require transformation. Four critical aspects of this transformation include: “Boosting the small; Transforming the Big; Losing Less; and Eating Smarter.” Examining these four areas more deeply, it becomes evident that, while new technology will be critical to the transformation, government involvement, as well as better financial and behavioral change from residents and consumers, will be required. This chapter focuses on these four pillars that make up the global food system transformation for resilience.

Navigating the politics and processes of food systems transformation: guidance from a holistic framework

“…Building counter-narratives-There is no absence of counternarratives to the neoliberal-driven productivist ideals (Leeuwis et al, 2021;Elechi et al, 2022). Food sovereignty, regenerative agriculture, and rights-based approach, which have been championed by organizations such as Via Campesina and other civil society entities or even the UN, are testaments of these emerging counter-narratives (Claeys, 2013;Holt-Giménez and Altieri, 2013;Anderson and Rivera-Ferre, 2021).…”

“…Arguably, a positive consequence of the drive for transformations is the enhanced visibility of the issue, which is partly evident in actors' contemplation on how to guide the process purposively. From specific actions (Elechi et al, 2022), to policy bundles (Barrett et al, 2022), search for pathways (Dentoni et al, 2017), or even paradigm shifts (Ruben et al, 2021;Sandhu, 2021), scholars are scrabbling with many propositions. From reducing meat intake (Rust et al, 2020) to the structural reconstitution of governance arrangements (Garnett, 2013;Fraser et al, 2016), there are many proposed "solutions" to redirect food systems toward more sustainable outcomes.…”

La alimentación agroecológica base para la sostenibilidad urbana

“…Son muchas las voces que argumentan que los llamados sistemas agrícolas industriales requieren un cambio sistémico para volverse sostenibles y abordar la seguridad alimentaria y nutricional (Swinburn et al, 2019;Willett et al, 2019;Béné, 2022;Elechi et al, 2022;Fanzo et al, 2022) y que la simple implementación de algunas prácticas y el cambio de algunas tecnologías no son suficientes, sino que es necesaria la aplicación de principios agroecológicos y se requiere un rediseño de los sistemas agrícolas (Migliorini y Wezel, 2018).…”

Food System Transformation and Gut Microbiota Transition: Evidence on Advancing Obesity, Cardiovascular Diseases, and Cancers—A Narrative Review

“…A long-term historical perspective that has altered and become more sophisticated in accordance with economic progress can be utilized to investigate the concept of the food system. It consists of the following: (1) the chain of activities from producer to consumer; (2) the drivers and outcomes of the food chain, which have economic, political, environmental, health, and social dimensions; (3) the numerous entities, institutions, and people directly and indirectly involved; and (4) the connections between all of these elements, which means that an action in one area of the system has an impact on other areas of the system [2]. Braun et al [3] conceptualized food systems as "the entire range of actors and their interconnected value-adding activities involved in the production, aggregation, processing, distribution, consumption, and disposal (loss or waste) of food products that originate from agriculture (including livestock), forestry, fisheries and food industries, as well as the broader economic, societal, and natural environments in which they are embedded".…”