Conceptualizing food systems for global environmental change research
Introduction
Food security, defined as when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life (World Food Summit, 1996), is a policy issue of importance in just about every country. The food security status of any group can be considered as the principal outcome of food systems, if these systems are defined broadly and generically. Increases in the efficiency and productivity of food systems have resulted in successes around the world in reducing the prevalence of hunger and improving nutrition. However, these successes are shadowed by serious concerns about those aspects of food systems that pose threats to social, economic and environmental goals and hence undermine food security. In addition, global environmental change, in the context of social, political and economic changes, may bring unprecedented stresses to bear on food systems and food security.
Food systems have usually been conceived of as a set of activities ranging from production through to consumption. However, food security is a complex issue with multiple environmental, social, political and economic determinants. It encompasses components of availability, access and utilization. A comprehensive and holistic analysis of how the current organization of food production, processing, distribution and consumption contributes to food security requires broadening the concept of a “food system” beyond only those activities. A host of other economic, social, and environmental drivers affect food security as well, and the interactions among these drivers, activities and outcomes are complex. A broader definition of food systems therefore includes:
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the interactions between and within biogeophysical and human environments, which determine a set of activities;
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the activities themselves (from production through to consumption);
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outcomes of the activities (contributions to food security, environmental security, and social welfare) and
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other determinants of food security (stemming in part from the interactions in bullet one).
Both food systems and food security in the 21st century are fundamentally characterized by social and economic change, such as the marked intensification of food production, the tremendous growth of processing and packaging of food products, corporate concentration in retailing and distribution, and the rising influence of large numbers of urban consumers. Developing policy to ensure food security is a tremendous challenge that requires a comprehensive and integrated analytical approach (Maxwell and Slater, 2003).
Adding to the social and economic trends are concerns about global environmental change and food systems, given the pace at which environmental change drivers are acting and the scale of human domination of ecosystems (Vitousek et al., 1997; Steffen et al., 2003). Global environmental and socio-economic changes are happening simultaneously, and they involve rapid and complex processes with uncertain consequences. So-called “cross-scale” interactions, between processes and actors in different arenas and at different levels, e.g. from local to regional, introduce even greater complexity and uncertainty (Cash et al., 2006). Understanding how to manage food systems in this context poses considerable research and policy-making challenges. Further complicating the issue is the impact that food systems themselves have on the environment, as the activities and outcomes are also drivers of global environmental change and create feedback loops.
Section snippets
Purpose of the paper: a framework for research
This paper outlines a framework for studying the interactions of food systems with global environmental change and evaluating the major societal outcomes affected by these interactions: food security, ecosystem services, and social welfare. This analysis will hopefully inform possible adaptive strategies and build adaptive capacity to bolster the resilience of food systems in the face of global environmental change. In building the framework, the paper explores and synthesizes the disparate
Challenges of modern food systems
The wide ranging literature on “food systems” reveals multiple perspectives and world views (Sobal et al., 1998). The most useful conceptualizations are those which describe a food system as a chain of activities from production (‘the field) to consumption (‘the table’), with particular emphasis on processing and marketing and the multiple transformations of food that these entail (Heller and Keoleian, 2003; Dixon, 1999; Cannon, 2002; Lang and Heasman, 2004). The general global trends in modern
Trends in global food security
Most often food security is analyzed in terms of why people do not have it—i.e. why they are hungry or malnourished. Society still faces a number and range of food insecure situations, but the nature of food insecurity shifted fundamentally over the 20th century. Social causes are now recognized as fundamentally important (Devereux, 2000). Growth in incomes and agricultural productivity, improvements in market functioning, along with political will to intervene to prevent famines, has improved
Global environmental change and food system performance
Global environmental change encompasses changes in the biogeophysical environment, which may be due to natural processes and/or human activities. These changes may manifest at the global scale or they may occur locally but be so widespread that they are a global phenomenon (GECAFS, 2005). Examples include changes in atmospheric composition from the release of greenhouse gases and the consequences such as increased temperatures (Walker and Steffen, 1997), and variability in precipitation cycles
The value of a “systems” approach for applied research
There is a tradition in both the social and biophysical sciences of using the concept of a system to help in addressing complex problems with multi-causality resulting from interactions among interdependent components. A system of interest can be assessed in the broader context or environment in which it is found, and the impact of changes in these broader environments can be considered at the scale of analysis (Aronson, 1996). Systems approaches help in understanding the critical factors that
A food systems framework for global environmental change research
To take a holistic approach to understanding global environmental change and food system interactions, I propose a broad framework for food systems, which includes feedbacks and interactions among drivers and considers multiple outcomes (see Fig. 1a). This approach inherently accepts that ecosystems are managed (directly and indirectly) for human benefit and that one set of services may be emphasized (e.g. food production) at the cost of another (e.g. clean water for fish) and that these goals
Tracing a global environmental change through a food system
Many environmental changes have direct impacts on producing food in a given location; however, the consequences of these impacts for food security are less direct, given that food security depends upon many other factors besides availability from local production. The structure of activities and the characteristics of outcomes determine the impact of an environmental change. Thus for the example in Table 2, an environmental stress affecting local rice production might not change availability,
Evaluating the food system outcomes
The three categories of outcomes considered in this framework—food security, environmental security, and social welfare—are often those amongst which decision makers at different levels (household, district, nation, or region) make conscious or unconscious choices. Food systems and food security are highly contested topics, as are the conflicts between economic growth and the protection of environmental services. There are many ways in which these outcomes can be evaluated, depending upon the
Research challenges: cross-scale and multi-level interactions
Food systems as described here are multi-level with respect to both time and space. They also span more than one analytical scale. Hence their analysis must trace cross-scale interactions, especially the feedbacks. The scale and level of observation determines which of a given range of parameters is observed to be more influential on an outcome (Wilbanks and Kates, 1999), so explanations of cause and effect will vary. The scale of observation can also limit understanding of which variables are
Conclusions for future research
With sufficient empirical evidence, this framework could be used to build a database describing typologies of food system interactions. Such a typology could be organized in several ways. One typology could distinguish between slow and fast processes in food systems. Resilience approaches to social–ecological system management suggest that managers often respond only to fast processes, even though the slow ones are more critical to ensuring a system's capacity to buffer disturbance and maintain
Acknowledgments
The author thanks the following reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments: Hallie Eakin, Peter Gregory, Barbara Huddleston, John Ingram, Adrian Trotman, Stanley Wood and Monika Zurek, as well as three anonymous reviewers. This paper is a contribution to the Global Environmental Change and Food Systems (GECAFS) Project. The author is grateful for financial support from UK ESRC and NERC.
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