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

considers the inadvertent impacts of governance on food systems, for instance the interactionbetween biofuels, energy efficiency or carbon sequestration projects and food security.Enhanced research on food system governance clearly has many interesting and highly usefulavenues to explore and would be a major contribution to alleviating food insecurity.Box 1 The E. coli outbreak in Germany, June 2011: an example of multi-level food systemgovernance failure regarding food safety.The response to E. coli outbreak in Germany in June 2011 is a good example of the complexitymulti-scale, multi-level interactions bring to food safety aspects of food system governance. Ithighlights – in this case – monocentric governance failings. The contamination was initiallythought to have come from the import of Spanish produce into Germany (later proved wrong) andthereby spanned spatial and jurisdictional levels. At European level, the aim is to promote tradebetween member states, but also to have public food safety systems for the region in place.National food safety and health agencies are only mandated to operate within the nationalboundaries, i.e. on a different jurisdictional level. With the health problem being largely confinedto the Hamburg region, the local health management had to address the immediate health problem.All these levels have a monocentric system in place, operating at the respective level. Given thesethree distinct spatial and jurisdictional levels, it is hard to establish who is in charge of managingthe situation, and what the formal lines of communication are. The monocentric approach did notappear able to deal with the multi-level emergency.As reported in a Leading Article in The Independent (11 June 2011) the E. coli outbreak exposedflaws in food system governance in Germany and in Europe: “Germany’s federal structure, inwhich most responsibility for health is devolved to individual states, may be a factor in the ill-coordinatedresponse. … Nor was the EU well equipped to compensate for failings at Germannational level. EU officials could do little more than watch as the Germans and Spanish tradedinsults, even though the E. coli outbreak was claiming victims across Europe and growers not onlyin Spain faced ruin”. The cross-level interactions within the food system, spanning multiple foodsystem activities affecting food system outcomes related to food safety, food production andlivelihoods could perhaps have been better managed had an adaptive governance system been inplace, or rapidly arisen. Health researchers could have communicated informally with each otherand with growers, possibly ascertaining the source of contamination more quickly. This “adaptivegovernance” approach proved successful in the case of the SARS outbreak in SE Asia in 2006,where an informal network of scientists provided a faster ‘solution’ than the formal monocentricsystems at the international and national levels (C. Termeer, pers comm).Practical challenges to implementing food security researchThe sub-sections above identify many conceptual scientific challenges to improving foodsecurity. Methodological challenges also arise, and although several are discussed in Paper 6,a few are worth stressing here, in the context of the scientific advances and challengesidentified above:121