scholarly journals Towards Territorially Embedded, Equitable and Resilient Food Systems? Insights from Grassroots Responses to COVID-19 in Italy and the City Region of Rome

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 2425
Author(s):  
Simona Zollet ◽  
Luca Colombo ◽  
Paola De De Meo ◽  
Davide Marino ◽  
Steven R. McGreevy ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Alternative Food Networks ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
System Transformation ◽  
City Region ◽  
The Face ◽  
Negative Impacts ◽  
The City

The negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have further exposed and exacerbated the structural weaknesses and inequalities embedded in the global industrial agri-food system. While the mainstream narrative continues to emphasise the importance of ensuring the uninterrupted functioning of global supply chains to counter COVID-related disruptions, the pandemic has also highlighted the resilience of small-scale, sustainable family farming and of spatially and socially embedded food systems. Based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of three surveys, this study examines organic and agroecological farmers’ responses to the first COVID-related lockdown (March–May 2020) in Italy, as well as the responses of grassroots alternative food networks (AFN) in the city region of Rome. The results show how local grassroots action played a significant role in ensuring food access, provisioning, and distribution, often in the face of delayed or insufficient action of mainstream food system actors and institutions. These grassroots responses identify opportunities and barriers for agri-food system transformation away from neoliberal, market-based interventions and towards policies that support food sovereignty and democracy in the context of localised, agroecology-based and more resilient agri-food systems.

scholarly journals Envisioning the Future of European Food Systems: Approaches and Research Priorities After COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Vittuari ◽  
Giovanni Bazzocchi ◽  
Sonia Blasioli ◽  
Francesco Cirone ◽  
Albino Maggio ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Food Production ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Production Systems ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Research Priorities ◽  
Policy Framework ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
City Region ◽  
Research And Innovation

The COVID-19 pandemic unveiled the fragility of food sovereignty in cities and confirmed the close connection urban dwellers have with food. Although the pandemic was not responsible for a systemic failure, it suggested how citizens would accept and indeed support a transition toward more localized food production systems. As this attitudinal shift is aligned with the sustainability literature, this work aims to explore the tools and actions needed for a policy framework transformation that recognizes the multiple benefits of food systems, while considering local needs and circumstances. This perspective paper reviews the trends in production and consumption, and systematizes several impacts emerged across European food systems in response to the first wave of pandemic emergency, with the final aim of identifying challenges and future strategies for research and innovation toward the creation of resilient and sustainable city/region food systems. The proposal does not support a return to traditional small-scale economies that might not cope with the growing global population. It instead stands to reconstruct and upscale such connections using a “think globally act locally” mind-set, engaging local communities, and making existing and future citizen-led food system initiatives more sustainable. The work outlines a set of recommended actions for policy-makers: support innovative and localized food production, training and use of information and communication technology for food production and distribution; promote cross-pollination among city/region food systems; empower schools as agents of change in food provision and education about food systems; and support the development of assessment methodologies and the application of policy tools to ensure that the different sustainability dimensions of the food chain are considered.

Fulfilling the Right to Food for South Africa: Justice, Security, Sovereignty and the Politics of Malnutrition

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 112-152
Author(s):  
Busiso Helard Moyo ◽  
Anne Marie Thompson Thow
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Food Justice ◽  
System Transformation ◽  
Right To Food ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right

Despite South Africa’s celebrated constitutional commitments that have expanded and deepened South Africa’s commitment to realise socio-economic rights, limited progress in implementing right to food policies stands to compromise the country’s developmental path. If not a deliberate policy choice, the persistence of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all its forms is a deep policy failure.  Food system transformation in South Africa requires addressing wider issues of who controls the food supply, thus influencing the food chain and the food choices of the individual and communities. This paper examines three global rights-based paradigms – ‘food justice’, ‘food security’ and ‘food sovereignty’ – that inform activism on the right to food globally and their relevance to food system change in South Africa; for both fulfilling the right to food and addressing all forms of malnutrition. We conclude that the emerging concept of food sovereignty has important yet largely unexplored possibilities for democratically managing food systems for better health outcomes.

The transition movement and food sovereignty: From local resilience to global engagement in food system transformation

2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 254-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Sage
Keyword(s):  
Food System ◽  
Local Food ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
System Transformation ◽  
External Threats ◽  
Global Engagement ◽  
International Solidarity ◽  
Local Resilience ◽  
The Face ◽  
Vital Element

The emergence of grassroots social movements variously preoccupied with a range of external threats, such as diminishing supplies of fossil energy or climate change, has led to increased interest in the production of local food. Drawing upon the notion of cognitive praxis, this article utilises transition as a trajectory guided by an overarching cosmology that brings together a broad social movement seeking a more resilient future. This ‘grand narrative’ is reinforced by ‘transition movement intellectuals’ who serve to shape an agenda of local preparedness in the face of uncertainty, rather than structural analysis of the global system. In this context, growing and producing food offers important multi-functional synergies by reconnecting people to place and its ecological endowments and serves to provide a vital element in civic mobilisation. Yet, local food could also become a means to build international solidarity in defence of food sovereignty and establish a global coalition opposed to the corporate agri-food agenda of biotechnologies, land grabbing and nutritional impoverishment.

scholarly journals Financing food system transformation: insights from global climate projects

2021 ◽  
Vol 9s10 ◽  
pp. 21-42
Author(s):  
Abrar Chaudbury ◽  
Saher Hasnain
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Systems Approach ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
System Transformation ◽  
Climate Targets ◽  
The Face ◽  
Global Food

Climate change poses unprecedented and complex challenges to global food systems. Critical vulnerabilities, continuing inequalities, and unsustainability have demonstrated that food systems need significant intervention in order to deliver safe, just, and healthy food for all, against the backdrop of a changing climate. Innovative interventions and effective financing are needed across the food system to achieve these grand ambitions. While there is recognition of a systems approach in the face of complex issues such as climate change, interventions and financing mechanisms have historically focused narrowly on production or specific sectors within food and related systems. Given the diverse array of stresses and shocks, this approach will not achieve the desired paradigm shifts necessary to secure global food systems and meet the Paris Agreement climate targets. Through a comprehensive review of projects funded through the Green Climate Fund (GCF), this paper shows that paradigm shifting interventions can benefit from a food systems perspective by moving beyond specific sectors and activities and delivering outcomes across the socio-economic and environmental spheres. Climate change and food system challenges are complex and necessitate system approaches, and financing instruments need to be designed and structured with systemic complexity in mind.

scholarly journals Validating the City Region Food System Approach: Enacting Inclusive, Transformational City Region Food Systems

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 1680 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Blay-Palmer ◽  
Guido Santini ◽  
Marielle Dubbeling ◽  
Henk Renting ◽  
Makiko Taguchi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
System Approach ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
City Region ◽  
The City

scholarly journals Achieving Food System Resilience Requires Challenging Dominant Land Property Regimes

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Calo ◽  
Annie McKee ◽  
Coline Perrin ◽  
Pierre Gasselin ◽  
Steven McGreevy ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Food System ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
System Transformation ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
Global North ◽  
System Resilience

Although evidence continues to indicate an urgent need to transition food systems away from industrialized monocultures and toward agroecological production, there is little sign of significant policy commitment toward food system transformation in global North geographies. The authors, a consortium of researchers studying the land-food nexus in global North geographies, argue that a key lock-in explaining the lack of reform arises from how most food system interventions work through dominant logics of property to achieve their goals of agroecological production. Doing so fails to recognize how land tenure systems, codified by law and performed by society, construct agricultural land use outcomes. In this perspective, the authors argue that achieving food system “resilience” requires urgent attention to the underlying property norms that drive land access regimes, especially where norms of property appear hegemonic. This paper first reviews research from political ecology, critical property law, and human geography to show how entrenched property relations in the global North frustrate the advancement of alternative models like food sovereignty and agroecology, and work to mediate acceptable forms of “sustainable agriculture.” Drawing on emerging cases of land tenure reform from the authors' collective experience working in Scotland, France, Australia, Canada, and Japan, we next observe how contesting dominant logics of property creates space to forge deep and equitable food system transformation. Equally, these cases demonstrate how powerful actors in the food system attempt to leverage legal and cultural norms of property to legitimize their control over the resources that drive agricultural production. Our formulation suggests that visions for food system “resilience” must embrace the reform of property relations as much as it does diversified farming practices. This work calls for a joint cultural and legal reimagination of our relation to land in places where property functions as an epistemic and apex entitlement.

scholarly journals Transformative potential from the ground up: Sustainable innovation journeys, soft change and alignment of interests in urban food initiatives

2021 ◽  
pp. 096977642110288
Author(s):  
Damian Maye ◽  
Paul Swagemakers ◽  
Johannes SC Wiskerke ◽  
Heidrun Moschitz ◽  
James Kirwan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Food Policy ◽  
City Region ◽  
Short Supply ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
Sustainable Innovation ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
The City

This paper utilises the ‘sustainable innovation journeys’ concept to trace how people organise and design urban food initiatives and influence city-region food policy. We evaluate whether designs succeed or fail and monitor the exchange of ideas that takes place between stakeholders. Tracing these interactions reveals the transformative potential of innovative projects, particularly if the food system changes they bring to the fore are aligned with policy interests. Three case studies provide on-the-ground insights to assess how small and medium-sized enterprises at the micro-level induce sustainability shifts. The case studies are businesses in the city-regions of Rotterdam, The Netherlands (urban farm and circular food economy); Vigo, Spain (food, forest and multi-functional land use); and Zurich, Switzerland (organic food and short supply chains). Each initiative was studied in-depth over a two-year period, with follow-up analysis for a further four years to monitor change over time (2013–2018). The cases promote the adoption of micro-level innovation practices: locally designed transition pathways that bring the benefits of change to the city-region (i.e. from the micro-level initiative to meso-level policy). The analysis highlights the importance of ‘soft change’. This can be something as simple as visiting an inspiring urban food initiative and meeting with stakeholders to generate mutual understanding, from where interests align to influence food chain practices and policy. Soft changes act as ‘seeds of transition’ for a shift towards more sustainable urban food systems, but we observe too potentially negative impacts due to lack of alignment at the micro- (initiative) or meso- (city-region) levels.

scholarly journals Measuring Progress in Sustainable Food Cities: An Indicators Toolbox for Action

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Moragues-Faus ◽  
Alizée Marceau
Keyword(s):  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Sustainability Assessment ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
Sustainable Food ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Negative Impacts ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

Despite the growth of urban food policies across the globe, a key challenge remains around measuring the impact of these initiatives in building more sustainable and just cities. The literature identifies as the main barriers to progress food system assessments the lack of clear definitions of sustainability, insufficient data, the low applicability of global conceptualisations to local conditions and vice versa and low levels of actor involvement. We aim to address these gaps by co-developing a sustainability assessment framework to evaluate food systems performance in UK cities. The framework emerging from this collaborative process overcomes key limitations of previous exercises by providing a place-based and participative definition of sustainability aligned with global conceptualisations, building on the experiences and needs of a wide range of practitioners and taking a holistic but non-prescriptive approach to understanding food system outcomes. However, its application to the city of Cardiff reveals new challenges, mostly regarding the need to incorporate underrepresented stakeholders as well as account for multiscalar food system interdependencies and their positive but also negative impacts. Results show the need to embed critical perspectives in sustainable food assessments that actively expand their transformative capacity by developing further inclusive, participatory, place-based and whole-systems approaches.

scholarly journals Alternative Agri-Food Systems Under a Market Agencements Approach: The Case of Multifunctional Farming Activity in a Peri-Urban Area

Environments ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Maria Cecilia Mancini ◽  
Filippo Arfini ◽  
Federico Antonioli ◽  
Marianna Guareschi
Keyword(s):  
Urban Area ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Alternative Food ◽  
Design Stage ◽  
Alternative Food Networks ◽  
Alternative Food Systems ◽  
Design And Implementation ◽  
Trade Offs

(1) Background: A large body of literature is available on the environmental, social, and economic sustainability of alternative food systems, but not much of it is devoted to the dynamics underlying their design and implementation, more specifically the processes that make an alternative food system successful or not in terms of its sustainability aims. This gap seems to be particularly critical in studies concerning alternative food systems in urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA). This paper explores how the design and implementation of multifunctional farming activity in a peri-urban area surrounding the city of Reggio Emilia in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy impact the achievement of its sustainability aims. (2) Methods: The environmental, social, and economic components of this project are explored in light of the sociology of market agencements. This method brings up the motivations of the human entities involved in the project, the role played by nonhuman entities, and the technical devices used for the fulfillment of the project’s aims. (3) Results: The alternative food system under study lacked a robust design phase and a shared definition of the project aims among all the stakeholders involved. This ended in a substantial mismatch between project aims and consumer expectations. (4) Conclusions: When a comprehensive design stage is neglected, the threefold aim concerning sustainability might not be achievable. In particular, the design of alternative food systems must take into account the social environment where it is intended to be put in place, especially in UPA, where consumers often live in suburban neighborhoods wherein the sense of community is not strong, thus preventing them from getting involved in a community-based project. In such cases, hybridization can play a role in the sustainability of alternative food networks, provided that some trade-offs occur among the different components of sustainability—some components of sustainability will be fully achieved, while others will not.

scholarly journals The Role of Biophilic Agents in Building a Green Resilient City; the Case of Birmingham, UK

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 5033
Author(s):  
Linda Novosadová ◽  
Wim van der Knaap
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Climate Resilience ◽  
Natural Land ◽  
Negative Impacts ◽  
Community Projects ◽  
Business As Usual ◽  
The City

The present research offers an exploration into the biophilic approach and the role of its agents in urban planning in questions of building a green, resilient urban environment. Biophilia, the innate need of humans to connect with nature, coined by Edgar O. Wilson in 1984, is a concept that has been used in urban governance through institutions, agents’ behaviours, activities and systems to make the environment nature-inclusive. Therefore, it leads to green, resilient environments and to making cities more sustainable. Due to an increasing population, space within and around cities keeps on being urbanised, replacing natural land cover with concrete surfaces. These changes to land use influence and stress the environment, its components, and consequently impact the overall resilience of the space. To understand the interactions and address the adverse impacts these changes might have, it is necessary to identify and define the environment’s components: the institutions, systems, and agents. This paper exemplifies the biophilic approach through a case study in the city of Birmingham, United Kingdom and its biophilic agents. Using the categorisation of agents, the data obtained through in-situ interviews with local professionals provided details on the agent fabric and their dynamics with the other two environments’ components within the climate resilience framework. The qualitative analysis demonstrates the ways biophilic agents act upon and interact within the environment in the realm of urban planning and influence building a climate-resilient city. Their activities range from small-scale community projects for improving their neighbourhood to public administration programs focusing on regenerating and regreening the city. From individuals advocating for and educating on biophilic approach, to private organisations challenging the business-as-usual regulations, it appeared that in Birmingham the biophilic approach has found its representatives in every agent category. Overall, the activities they perform in the environment define their role in building resilience. Nonetheless, the role of biophilic agents appears to be one of the major challengers to the urban design’s status quo and the business-as-usual of urban governance. Researching the environment, focused on agents and their behaviour and activities based on nature as inspiration in addressing climate change on a city level, is an opposite approach to searching and addressing the negative impacts of human activity on the environment. This focus can provide visibility of the local human activities that enhance resilience, while these are becoming a valuable input to city governance and planning, with the potential of scaling it up to other cities and on to regional, national, and global levels.

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