The Rural-Urban Food Systems’ Links with the Agenda 2030: From FAO Guidelines on Food Supply and Distribution Systems to a Dairy Sector Application in the Area of Bogota

Stefano Armenia,Alberto Atzori,Alessandro Pompei,Andres Castaño Barreto,Jorge Fonseca

doi:10.3390/systems7030045

Abstract

What should be the policy to meet urban food needs in developing countries and those in transition? This is a key question of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), which was posed into the “FAO’s methodological and operational guide to study and understand Food Supply and Distribution Systems (FSDS) to cities in developing countries and countries in transition” in order to face the current overwhelming increase of urban population and the increasing urbanization pressures on food systems. Following some previous work in the field where it was argued that clarifying the various problems and structure behind Food Supply and Distribution Systems (FSDS) in urban environments is vital to assess policies that aim at meeting urban food needs, the purpose of this paper is to show that the methodological approach known as system dynamics modeling and simulation can lead, in terms of knowledge and/or theoretical contribution, to the unfolding of complexity in this area of research as well as bring into the analysis the relationships across a few goals of the Agenda 2030. As an additional result, we show how the developed model can be applied (case of the production of milk for consumption in the city of Bogota, Colombia) to analyze the dynamics of food supply and distribution systems in urban environments.

Highlights

During the past 50 years, several international organizations, using different methodological approaches, have predicted the increase of world’s population and, food demand for the decades
We present an evolution of the systems thinking model into a quantitative system dynamics model, which will be preliminary tested on the case of milk production/milk consumption in the city of Bogota (Colombia)
The FFFA consists in a fundamental study for the characterization of food supply and distribution systems based on the observation of developing countries and countries in transition

Summary

Introduction

During the past 50 years, several international organizations, using different methodological approaches, have predicted the increase of world’s population and, food demand for the decades. There is by evidencing a matching/mapping (or even just some kind of relationship) between the Sustainable the need to maintain a certain coherence between the systems approach and the holistic vision of the Development Goals (SDGs) and the areas addressed by FAO in their policy guidelines. (ii) link the FFFA to the Agenda 2030 framework by identifying which of the SDGs could be affected in each part of the developed model This will provide a systemic map of the food supply layered with the SDGs potentially affected by direct or side effects of food policies. The work presents a brief list of SD models applied to the food systems the methodological steps followed to revise the FAO version of the FFFA and the development of the systemic perspective of the food supply and distribution systems. We present an evolution of the systems thinking model into a quantitative system dynamics model, which will be preliminary tested on the case of milk production/milk consumption in the city of Bogota (Colombia)

Literature Review

Materials and Methods

Narrative Description of the FAO’s Methodological Targets and the SDGs

Overall

Diagram

Findings