High angle view of vendors selling a selection of fresh vegetables on a street market. Credit: Mint Images/ Mint Images RF/ Getty Images
Major threats to global food security, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ukraine-Russia war, and climate change, have accelerated the need for an urgent shift from prevailing arguments stuck in the local-versus-global food systems debate.
Without a fundamental departure from this problematic ‘either-or’ dichotomy, the world will lose out on the opportunity to build resilience into food systems across the spectrum, according to a Perspective published in Nature Food.
“It is not possible to develop pathways towards sustainable food systems that can navigate current and future crises by taking either a local or global perspective,” the research team argues in a paper, Reframing the local-global food systems debate through a resilience lens. The authors contend that despite growing knowledge that transformative change towards sustainable food systems depends on interactions and drivers across the spectrum, the broader societal debate is not keeping pace.
Stockholm University’s Amanda Wood, the lead author, says the status quo prompted the team to revisit the role that resilience thinking has to play.
The authors cite four major challenges to global food sustainability: environmental and nutritional decline, food insecurity and trade, inequity and governance, and food systems illiteracy.
But while the first three are archetypal, persistent threads that are particularly “polarising and paralysing” in food systems debates, they predict that it is the fourth that will grow in importance as food systems evolve and become more complex.
Co-author, Laura Pereira, of the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, explains that food literacy, which encompasses the diverse knowledge systems relating to our food, has been largely lost.
“This includes not just knowing what food is good for us and the planet, but also how to prepare it,” she says, positing that advancing widespread food literacy amongst all actors, from producers to consumers, will accelerate the requisite change.
Uno Svedin, another co-author continues: “Most families across the world have accumulated capacities to grow some vegetables, and to know how to care for food and ensure it’s not destroyed before being eaten. This is knowledge beyond books, and needs to be expanded and taken account of.”
Juxtaposing the “local” argument, the paper proposes an alternative scenario. “If we reframe the argument through a resilience lens, traceability and transparency campaigns can work across scales, to both increase individuals’ knowledge, and push global actors to shift their practices,” they write. Reframing these through a resilience lens, they propose, has the benefit of reorienting the focus – from scale-specific solutions, in favour of the critical capacities that need to be embedded within food systems to successfully advance social, environmental and economic sustainability.
Food security expert, Julian May, director of South Africa’s Department of Science and Technology/National Research Foundation Centre of Excellence in Food Security (COE-FS), lauded the clarity with which the authors addressed the complex issue of food systems resilience, and how it can be achieved.
“There has been a lot of talk, and a lot written about resilience of food systems within the climate change and COVID-19 contexts, and I fully agree with the authors that it isn’t true that the only choice we have to make is between local or global alternatives.
“In my centre, however, we refer to the collective action problem. We know that in order to achieve more sustainable and fair food systems, we have to get groups talking to and working with one another.
