Resilience and Food Security in a Food Systems Context

This open access book compiles a series of chapters written by internationally recognized experts known for their in-depth but critical views on questions of resilience and food security. The book assesses rigorously and critically the contribution of the concept of resilience in advancing our understanding and ability to design and implement development interventions in relation to food security and humanitarian crises. For this, the book departs from the narrow beaten tracks of agriculture and trade, which have influenced the mainstream debate on food security for nearly 60 years, and adopts instead a wider, more holistic perspective, framed around food systems. The foundation for this new approach is the recognition that in the current post-globalization era, the food and nutritional security of the world’s population no longer depends just on the performance of agriculture and policies on trade, but rather on the capacity of the entire (food) system to produce, process, transport and distribute safe, affordable and nutritious food for all, in ways that remain environmentally sustainable. In that context, adopting a food system perspective provides a more appropriate frame as it incites to broaden the conventional thinking and to acknowledge the systemic nature of the different processes and actors involved. This book is written for a large audience, from academics to policymakers, students to practitioners.

The book chapters include:

1. Resilience, Food Security and Food Systems: Setting the Scene
2. Achieving Food Security Through a Food Systems Lens
3. The Global Food System is Not Broken but Its Resilience is Threatened
4. Food Security and the Fractured Consensus on Food Resilience: An Analysis of Development Agency Narratives
5. Food Security and Resilience: The Potential for Coherence and the Reality of Fragmented Applications in Policy and Research
6. Food Systems, Resilience, and Their Implications for Public Action
7. Food Security Under a Changing Climate: Exploring the Integration of Resilience in Research and Practic
8. Gender, Resilience, and Food Systems
9. COVID-19, Household Resilience, and Rural Food Systems: Evidence from Southern and Eastern Africa
10. Place-Based Approaches to Food System Resilience: Emerging Trends and Lessons from South Africa
11. Urban Food Security and Resilience
12. Reflections and Conclusion

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