From Food Production to Food Security - Global Environmental ...

This important point about feed-backs motivates analyses of the synergies and trade-offsbetween varied desired outcomes from food systems. This can be done most effectively if thebroad food system approach is adopted. It thus drove the development of a set of ‘feed-back’questions for the GECAFS regional science plans (GECAFS, 2006a; GECAFS, 2007;GECAFS, 2008) as research agendas had hitherto generally been limited to the impacts ofGEC on food production, and the technical – and to some extent, policy – response options inthe agricultural domain. It is also a main feature of the scenarios analyses in CCAFS (CCAFSScenarios Team, 2010; and Paper 3) which are being developed to address the question “Howcan food security, livelihood and environmental goals all be met for a set of plausible futuresfor different regions of the world?”.Third, the food system approach helps frame discussions of vulnerability. Paper 1 introducesthe concepts of food system vulnerability, noting the important point that this is determinednot so much by the impact of stress, but by the combination of exposure to stress and thecapacity to cope with and recover from this stress. The fuller food system concept allows thisto be developed further by defining exactly which aspect of the food system (i.e. whichactivity(s)) are vulnerable to what (cf. the India/Nepal example in Paper 3) and how thisaffects food security.Science contributions from integrating the food systems approach with scale conceptsWhile the ‘food systems’ approach thus enhances interdisciplinary science agendas in severalways, its real value comes in helping to understand the interactions between the multiplescales and levels thereon which characterise how food systems operate in practice.Gibson et al. (2000) define ‘scale’ as the spatial, temporal, quantitative, or analyticaldimensions used to measure and study any phenomenon, and ‘levels’ as the units of analysisthat are located at different positions on a scale. Cash et al. (2006) build on this, notingspatial, temporal, jurisdictional, institutional, management scales, and the need to recognisethe importance of interactions between levels along each of these (e.g. from local to global, orseasonal to decadal). Food security issues span a number of different scales and, as noted inPaper 3, a predominant feature of 21 st Century food systems is that they are inherently crossleveland cross-scale.The importance of spatial, temporal, jurisdictional and other scales and scaling asdetermining factors in many environmental and food security problems is now wellrecognised, and both scientists and policy makers are increasingly aware that findingsolutions requires consideration of various scales. This is particularly important in relation togovernance of complex socio-ecological systems (as exemplified in food systems), andespecially as they are dynamic; governance, policies and planning have to consider multipletime levels (“… all people, at all times, have physical and economic access …”, (FAO,1996b).109