The future of our food systems needs all parties involved to adapt their activities to address future challenges, researchers at the Environmental Change Institute has found.
And it may be that those involved need to rethink their aims as desired food system outcomes don’t always align, and trade-offs will need to be negotiated.
Researchers at the ECI have been looking at food system resilience for many years and studying how improvements can be made in the interconnected processes that influence our health, and social, environmental and economic outcomes. Understanding what can make our food system more resilient has important implications for policy and intervention design.
Never more so than during the Covid-19 pandemic was it more apparent that there are weaknesses in the chain and its complexity makes food systems vulnerable to a wide array of shocks and stresses which can individually or interactively impact single or multiple points across the system.
In their paper Further concepts and approaches for enhancing food system resilience ECI co-authors Dr John Ingram, Food Systems research programme leader, Dr Monika Zurek, Senior Researcher and Dr Saher Hasnain, Postdoctoral Researcher, together with colleagues in other institutions, presented five questions to frame food system resilience:
Resilience of what? Resilience to what? Resilience from whose perspective? Resilience over what time frame? And for what purpose?
Not only are the answers to these questions interdependent, but they will also depend on who answers them.
The three Rs
In order to explore resilience further, the authors took a ‘three-Rs’ approach:
- Robustness: protecting current food system outcomes from change
- Recovery: returning to original food system outcomes after a disruption
- Reorientation: working to accept alternative food system outcomes before or after disruption
Currently, most emphasis tends to fall on robustness and recovery, but reorientation has an increasingly important role to play, even though it requires deeper negotiations between different food system participants.
They argued that the reorientation strategy should be pursued, because unlike robustness and recovery, reorientation offers the greatest potential for a food system that is both more resilient and sustainable.
However, authors noted that desirable outcomes do not always align between different groups’ objectives, and trade-offs will need to be evaluated. The balance between food affordability and hence accessibility versus environmental impact, for instance, will require careful negotiation between different participants and stakeholders with different value sets and aims.
In conclusion the study found new approaches to including the perceptions and goals of the different food system participants are needed to build food systems that are better positioned to address challenges of the future.
Dr John Ingram said: “While sustainability and resilience are not the same, the ‘reorientation’ approach can address both agenda.”