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

especially given the power now vested in the major food retailers (Grievink, 2003;Schilpzand et al., 2010).Reducing waste across the whole food system will increase the amount of food available forhuman consumption for the given level of inputs, thereby improving input use efficiency.Enhancing food system governanceAs Brown and Funk (2008) point out, “Transform agricultural systems through improvedseed, fertilizer, land use, and governance, and food security may be attained by all”. Theauthors thus draw attention to the need for enhanced governance in the food producingactivity, but in fact this applies both within and between all activities in the food system; poorgovernance anywhere in the food system (be it related to political, economic or socialaspects) is often a major factor contributing to food insecurity.The inherent cross-level and cross-scale nature of 21st Century food systems means theyinvolve multiple actors and stakeholders. This is due, in part, to the globalization of foodsystems, the increasing power of large private sector companies and new roles of NGOs in,for example, organics and certification. Related to this, one of the most significant recenttrends in food systems is the increasing importance of private sector and non-governmentalactors in governance – the formal and informal rules, institutions and practices that guide themanagement of food within a complex network of governments, organizations and citizens(Biermann, 2007). As Schilpzand et al. (2010) note, this shift in governance towards nonstateactors has been “deeply shaped by several broad trends associated with recent patternsin economic globalization”. They identify five major drivers including: (i) the diminishingregulatory authority of nation-states and the tendency for them to shift into facilitative roles;(ii) conversely the growing authority and ‘regulatory’ role of large corporations, particularlythrough supply chain management and private contracting, which is also often described as‘private rulemaking’; (iii) the spread of corporate social responsibility (CSR) doctrine andpractices, as well as an explosion of public-private or social-private alliances; (iv) a parallelgrowth in the role of NGOs at all levels of governance; and (v) the emergence of globalnetworks as a key cross-cutting organizational form, and the way in which global supplychains have become the focus of regulatory efforts.Food system governance is hence highly complex, further complicated by differingunderstanding of scales and levels and a range of governance approaches. Termeer et al.(2010) address the need to “disentangle” governance complexity by identifying three types ofgovernance: ‘monocentric’ (the dominating formal structures), ‘multilevel’ (many examplesemerging) and ‘adaptive’ (relatively new and less experience). They note that adaptivegovernance has the “ambitious goal of developing new governance concepts that can handlethe inherent complexity and unpredictability of dynamic social-ecological systems”. It maytherefore be the most appropriate for food security research as it accommodates the complexinteractions between social and ecological systems. More importantly, however, adaptive119