Will managing food systems for resilience make us more food secure

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Will managing food systems for resilience make us
more food secure?

• Polly Ericksen
• Global Food Security and Environmental Change
  (GECAFS)
• Environmental Change Institute,
• Oxford University

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2008 vulnerable food systems
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Poor suffer more
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Food security
... exists 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)
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Food systems framework
Food System ACTIVITIES Producing food natural
resources, inputs, technology, Processing
packaging food raw materials, standards,
consumer demand, Distributing retailing food
marketing, advertising, trade, Consuming food
acquisition, preparation, customs,
Food System OUTCOMES Contributing to
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Resilience approach

• Coupled social and ecological system
• Focus on structure and function of system and key
  processes/ dynamics, especially feedbacks
• Scale is critical
• Resilience at one scale embedded in higher and
  lower

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Resilience (2)

• Adaptive capacity is key to maintaining
  resilience
• Adaptive management requires monitoring and
  learning by institutions
• Governance and capacity are required

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(No Transcript)
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Pastoralist food insecurity in Northern Kenya

• Droughts increasingly trigger food insecurity
• Adaptive capacity of local pastoralists slowly
  eroded
• Climatic as well as social and political
• Government and NGO responses limited (but
  improving)
• Difficult to change current state
• Resilient or poverty trap?
• Heterogeneous situation

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Managing for resilience

• Managing involves both building and eroding
  resilience, depending upon the desirability of
  the state may need transformations
• ? For WHOM is resilience?
• ? Governance issues, politics and power
• Accountability, polycentric institutions,
  participation

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Transforming for resilience

• Requires preparation and transition phases
  linked by a window of opportunity
• Preparation knowledge, networks and leadership
• Navigating the transition requires flexibility
  and cross-scale interactions
• ? stress adaptive governance and role of
  disturbance as opportunity

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Northern Kenyan pastoralists

• Governance authority at national level some
  decentralization to local level but
  international donors still important
• Accountability difficult
• Participation is largely top down
• Outside subsidies necessary to re-generate
• Transforming the system could mean livelihoods
  and identities change
• Shadow networks are important

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Resilience in food systems challenges

• Resolving cross-scale tradeoffs
• Competing objectives
• Cross-scale subsidies
• Heterogeneity of food insecurity among different
  groups
• ?? Re transforming undesirability
• For whom? By whom?
• Social dynamics versus ecological dynamics

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Resilience in food systems challenges (2)

• Managing at the appropriate scale
• Trust and accountability at local level?
• How to link across scales, esp. w/ tradeoffs?
• Managing for disturbance
• Conflict with the current paradigms?
• Long planning horizons emphasis on stability,
  MSY
• Flexibility versus stability?
• Risk very serious for poor
• Diversification or diversity?

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Concluding thoughts

• Resilience approach suitable for the complexity
  and heterogeneity of food systems
• Cross-level and scale interactions must be
  highlighted and analyzed
• Adaptive management is challenging
• Ecosystem feedbacks as social dynamics
  substitute?
• Contested and competing outcomes?