Food Systems, Resilience, and Their Implications for Public Action

Linking the concepts of food systems and resilience offers the opportunity to strengthen our understanding of these concepts, the potential they hold for more informed policy discussions, and the design and implementation of interventions that will better deliver on food security outcomes. This chapter outlines how these twin concepts can be linked conceptually and empirically. It argues that while we know much about certain elements of the food system, specifically production and consumption, our understanding of the processing and distribution components of the food system are weak. For example, market structure in the processing sector and market integration can contribute to food system resilience, but these are rarely measured at a country level. This makes efforts to measure resilience at the system-level challenging. Understanding what can make a resilient food system has important implications for policy and intervention design. Building resilient food systems requires that policymakers grapple with trade-offs and tensions such as those between the benefits of diversification versus gains from specialization; and how openness to trade reduces vulnerability to domestic shocks to the food system while exposing it to external shocks. How best to manage these will be an important challenge to address.