Food System Resilience Measurement: Principles, Framework and Caveats
Applying a resilience lens, this framework is an essential tool for assessing the ability of a food system to maintain, protect and recover from shocks and disturbances.
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There is growing recognition that a better understanding of how food systems respond to crises is critical to build and protect the food security of local populations. But rigorous and reliable methods to measure food systems resilience are still missing. This paper builds on the current literature to develop an analytical framework aimed at assessing the resilience of food systems at the local level, along with a series of principles and caveats, on how to assess the resilience of food systems.
Principles of Food Systems Resilience Measurement
Food systems encompass “all the elements (environment, people, inputs, processes, infrastructures, institutions, etc.) and activities that relate to the production, processing, distribution, preparation, consumption [and waste management] of food, and the output of these activities, including socioeconomic and environmental outcomes.” Local food systems feed the majority of the rural and urban population in low- and middle-income countries, a large number of which are living under or close to the poverty line. As such, those local food systems are often the only source of affordable, nutritious food for both rural and urban poor communities. Building on this literature, the authors propose to define food systems resilience as “the ability of the different individual and institutional actors of the food system to maintain, protect or successfully recover the key functions of that system despite the impacts of disturbances.”
An Analytical Framework for Measuring Food Systems Resilience at the Local Level
The framework is structured around three complementary components.
Component 1: Actors and Food Systems Mapping
The task under Component 1 is to map the local food system under consideration and identify the different groups of individual and institutional actors engaged in it. This requires five different types of analysis:
- Characterization of the local food system context.
- Food system actor typology.
- Actors’ resilience capacities.
- Food system emergent properties.
- Characterization of food system exposure to disruption.
Component 2: Actors’ Resilience Assessment
The second component of the analysis corresponds to assessment of the individual actor’s resilience and is structured around four major elements. The four major elements are as follows:
- Direct and indirect effects of the most disruptive shock(s)/stressor(s).
- Individual actors’ response/mitigation strategy.
- Individual actor’s business disruption.
- Individual actor’s self-assessed ability to recover.
Component 3: Food Systems Resilience and Implications for Food Security Outcomes
The third and last component in the food systems resilience assessment is the analysis of the impacts that local food system actors’ resilience (or lack thereof) has on the resilience of the food system itself and, ultimately, on the local population’s well-being, in particular their food security and nutrition status. The authors propose to document this through a two-step process, collecting information about 1) the resilience status of the food system and 2) the immediate and mid- to long-term outcomes measured in terms of the local population’s food security and nutrition. This means they concentrate their attention on the core function of the food system, which is “the ability of the system to maintain, protect or successfully recover the availability and affordability of sufficient, nutritious and safe food for all.” As such, this core function will be assessed through indicators of stability over time of four dimensions of the food system:
- Price/affordability.
- Physical availability.
- Physical accessibility.
- Quality (safety) of food products.
Important Caveats
The authors highlight several important caveats — or limitations — to their approach:
- Feedback loops.
- Resilience versus sustainability.
- Evaluating resilience at the systems level.
- Resilience as a latent variable.
- Resilience trade‑offs.
- Informal food system actors.
- Non‑tangible resilience capacities.
- National-level food systems.