Weak governance and its consequences on food systems: analysis in two Ecuadorian territories

Inclusive diets within planetary boundaries

Who Eats, Where, What, and How? COVID-19, Food Security, and Canadian Foodscapes

This roundtable will follow up from the Workshop on Planetary Healthy Diets for All and explore practical solutions to tie increased sustainability of food systems to reductions in food insecurity in Europe. There is a disconnect between the level of scientific evidence supporting the need for action on food and agricultural systems and the willingness to uptake it at the national and local level. Countries' reluctance to implement evidence-based policy options often results from the perception that the data and solutions do not reflect their national realities. At the same time, there is a rising trend in food insecurity in Europe. Part of it is driven by the food system itself and part of it by social determinants that exacerbate the effects of elements such as food prices or the availability of affordable healthy foods. In terms of the current response to food insecurity in Europe, there is enough evidence that it is inadequate. The most notable example of inadequacy are food banks: they are unsustainable and perpetuate deficiencies of the foods system, such as waste. At the same time, food banks contribute to widening health inequities because they are stigmatizing, and the quality and reliability of the food they offer exacerbates health problems. They also mask failures of social protection and of food policy to protect those at the bottom. Yet, they are proliferating all around Europe. The WHO European Regional Office for Europe will share practical steps that it is taking to assist policy makers at national level to bridge evidence and action. WHO will present a novel on-line, readily accessible tool that public health officials from Member States can use to guide policy decisions. This tool uses a food systems model considering food consumption, food production, environmental impacts and health impacts to identify practical solutions for countries to create food systems that both have a lower impact on the climate and promote healthier diets. The roundtable will also highlight the transformative example of Copenhagen's public food procurement strategy, which, starting from a target on organic food in public canteens, has evolved into a comprehensive approach to achieve tasty, healthy, sustainable meals with social added value and without increasing procurement costs. In sum, against the backdrop of both nutritional and environmental challenges to food systems in Europe, participants at the roundtable will share barriers and opportunities to the uptake of evidence-based solutions to transform food systems and tackle food insecurity at the national and local levels, including in the context of the ongoing reform of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the new 'Farm to Fork' Strategy for sustainable food. This discussion will allow participants to share their insights and enrich each other's understanding of the issues at stake and the tools and opportunities on offer to support, in an action-oriented way, a sustainable food systems transition that overcomes food insecurity. Key messages Global reference diets need application on a national and subnational level. Food insecurity, can be major barrier to the uptake of healthy diets and must be tackled as such. The new data platform and training materials will empower policymakers within countries to develop and introduce national level initiatives, such as sustainable and healthy public procurement.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic it was widely reported that, in the United States, over 40 percent of food produced was wasted During the pandemic, news reports have described unprecedented household food waste, up by 30 percent according to Republic Services, one of the largest waste management services in the US (Helmer 2020) But upstream, food waste was, and continues to be, equally problematic When institutions such as schools and universities, large businesses, restaurants, and other venues must shut down, so too must the food supply chain for those locations Farmers who produce food for large-scale public use have been unable to redirect their products for grocery markets, and so in many cases their harvests and dairy cannot be used Elsewhere along the chain, farm and other food laborers (e g , meat-packing workers, delivery workers) without access to protection and health care cannot continue to pack and deliver food at "normal" levels, and so potential food has been left in fields and warehouses (Evich 2020)

Feeding the City, Pandemic and Beyond

An optimal diet for planet and people

Q&A with Betty Kibaara: Innovations that can deliver “good food” for Africa

Urban food systems: Factors associated with food insecurity in the urban settings evidence from Dessie and Combolcha cities, north-central Ethiopia

Today, global food production is the largest driver of environmental degradation and biodiversity loss (Willett et al. 2019). Rising global food demand and limited arable land are pushing us to expand agricultural frontiers and production. This often happens without regard to the environment, causing biodiversity loss, land and water degradation (Bioversity International 2017) Climate change is accelerating biodiversity loss. Higher temperatures disrupt pollination and natural pest control, affecting food quality (Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN 2017). Equally, the need to feed an additional 2 billion people by 2050 is pushing us to increase yields in a few staple foods, which erodes food and genetic diversity. Biodiversity loss in food systems leaves farmers with fewer options to deal with risks of crop failure, declining soil fertility, or increasingly variable weather (Bioversity International 2017), causing production losses, food insecurity and malnutrition(FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP WHO 2018). The way we produce and consume our food is hurting both people and the planet. This calls upon all of us, from governments to producers to consumers, to put biodiversity back into food (World Economic Forum (WEF) 2017). Food and - more broadly - agricultural biodiversity are essential for sustainable food systems. Agrobiodiversity boosts productivity and nutrition quality, increases soil and water quality, and reduces the need for synthetic fertilizers. It makes farmers’ livelihoods more resilient, reducing yield losses due to climate change and pest damage. Broadening the types of cultivated plants also benefits the environment, increasing the abundance of pollinators and beneficial soil organisms, and reducing the risk of pest epidemics. To sustainably use and conserve agrobiodiversity, governments need dedicated, multi-sectoral and evidence-based policies and strategies. From smallholder farmers to multinational companies, food producers are becoming increasingly important in conserving genetic resources and adopting sustainable agricultural practices. Consumers need to become more aware of the impact of their food choices on the planet and their role in preserving the environment. What actions do we need to put in place to make change happen? To answer, we need to be able to measure biodiversity in food systems. While decades of effort have advanced our understanding of sustainable food systems, biodiversity data remain uneven and oftentimes information is analyzed from sectoral perspectives (i.e.: production, consumption or conservation). To transform food systems, we need to look at the broader picture and understand the systemic linkages between biodiversity, food security and nutrition, agricultural production, and the environment. Bioversity International has developed the Agrobiodiversity Index, an innovative tool that brings together existing data on diets and markets, production and genetic resources, analyzing them under the lens of agricultural biodiversity (Bioversity International 2018). Through open access to agricultural biodiversity data for science and society, the tool crosses disciplinary boundaries and allows users to monitor biodiversity trends in food systems. In particular, it helps food systems actors to measure agrobiodiversity in a selected area or value chain, and understand to what extent their commitments and actions are contributing to its sustainable use and conservation. This user-friendly tool equips food systems actors with the data needed to make informed decisions. For example, it helps governments to formulate evidence-based agricultural, health and food policies and strategies to address today’s global challenges, by providing information on how biological and geographical diversity influence food systems sustainability. Through the Index, companies can understand how to diversify their supply chain and production to reduce risks, and what are the best agricultural practices for their agro-ecological zone. The tool can thereby support best practices dissemination, and track progress towards global goals related to agrobiodiversity, including Sustainable Development Goals 3, 12, 13, 15 and Aichi targets 7.

Welcome to our special issue, More than a Disaster: Creativity in Growing, Distributing, and Accessing Food During COVID-19. At the time this is being published, the world is just a few weeks shy of the two-year mark from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and fighting the new Omicron variant. Anthropological work in the field of disaster studies has demonstrated that crises can be great “revealers” of underlying structural problems, especially inequality and socioeconomic dynamics (Hoffman and Oliver-Smith 2002) affecting communities. Further, despite the common refrain that “disasters are great equalizers,” research shows that disasters and crises frequently increase inequality by further marginalization of people due to asymmetry in access to recovery resources (this has been widely shown in the field but is summarized nicely by Faas et al. 2020). Both understandings hold true in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it has lasted long enough that most communities have experienced significant changes in challenges and impacts, especially in terms of food production, distribution, and access. Early on, in 2020, the pandemic deeply disrupted foodways. Community lockdowns suspended critical sources of food access through social programs such as school lunches; workplaces generated high exposure risks for agricultural laborers and grocery workers, and precarious food service workers lost even marginally reliable work and wages as restaurants closed their doors; and food shortages and waste were widespread. More recently, despite the astonishing achievement of vaccine development and its agonizingly unjust global distribution, supply chains continue to face major disruption, causing food shortages, global food prices have increased by 33% due to pandemic-related obstacles and extreme weather events (FAO 2021), and the cost of potash and ammonia (crucial fertilizers for agricultural production) have skyrocketed portending future food production challenges. The vulnerabilities, inequities, and fragility that the pandemic exposed in our food systems were new to some and an old story for many (Béné 2020). Amidst all the hunger, fear, uncertainty, and logistic problems that the COVID-19 pandemic brought, this special issue seeks bright spots as it examines whether lessons learned might carry forward beyond the pandemic to strengthen the means of production and consumption. Bringing together six research articles and one research commentary and spanning five continents, all authors tackle the following shared question as an organizing framework for their articles. What can we learn from the creativity among responses to the COVID-19 impacts on our food systems that might apply long beyond this pandemic? Writing in conversation with one another since October of 2020, contributors approach their diverse topics with a collective perspective that the COVID-19 pandemic came at a time when our food systems were already facing unprecedented challenges from climate change, economic and food insecurity, treatment-resistant agricultural pests and diseases, systemic marginalization and racism, environmental degradation, and water and land shortages. Through the cross-cutting themes of decolonizing research, governance, provisioning, and technology, this collection considers whether and why (or not) creativity in responses, actions, and meaning-making for people working on food production, distribution, and access might model strategies for more resilient, sustainable, and equitable food systems. Anthropology and the wider social sciences have been grappling with decolonization of the discipline for more than fifty years (Clifford 2005; Harrison 1991) with renewed energy in the last decade. Still, more must be done. In her timely research commentary, Lewis (Cherokee Nation Citizen) fills a void in the literature and argues that anthropology continually “fails to answer what the benefits of anthropology are to Indigenous people.” When the COVID-19 pandemic was severely impacting Indian Country, anthropology’s history of limited support and use of Indigenous scholars’ research on food sovereignty meant that meaningful engagement and amplification, and recognition of Native Nations’ successes and challenges were virtually absent. Lewis proposes centering Native scholars work and community-based participatory research and collaboration as the only possibility of decolonized research with U.S. Indigenous communities. Community-based research is not easy. Burch and Legun openly reflect on the importance and some challenges that arose for white researchers and Indigenous Māori researchers through auto-ethnographic examination of their co-designed collaborative project on agritech in Aotearoa, New Zealand. The authors theorize their approach using the concept of response-able mattering to unpack the choices made in research that include or exclude who matters. Burch and Legun detail project strains that stemmed from particular cultures of time that academic project members brought to the collaboration along with the troubling absence of key stakeholders as participants in the co-design. This was further complicated by the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic which thwarted plans to meaningfully address both of these issues. Optimistically, they conclude, “the pandemic may also prepare us better for the kinds of flexibility, adaptability, and response-ability best practiced going forward.” The role of governments in mediating the pandemic from facilitating to obstructing food access, production, and consumption spanned many of the articles in this issue. Authors Schneider and Gugganig offer a thoughtful examination of the social, economic, and policy-based contradictions that seasonal farmworkers, farmers, the German citizenry, and the national government were forced to confront when the COVID-19 pandemic brought them together in unexpected ways to get one third of the global hop production harvested. Their layered critique of inequalities for agricultural laborers, most of whom are temporary migrants doing work that is described as “dirty, dangerous, and demanding,” is skillfully delivered amidst the complexities of often enduring relationships among many of the farmers and the laborers who return annualy to their farms. O’Connell, Gay, McDonald, and Tayal’s article on food insecruity in central North Carolina found that while the U.S. Federal government was considered ineffective, actions by local governments, including through the redistribution of paid staff, were viewed as critically helpful in keeping local farmers in business and farmers markets safe and open. This type of redistribution of public resources for community good in times of crisis is rare and powerful, though not entirely unprecedented; for example, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency maintains training and a list of volunteers to “deploy” to other agency sites during disasters. Some state cooperative extension agencies have similar programs where county agents and specialists will relieve and support their counterparts across the state. Informal governance can sidestep the red tape of government programs but face similar struggles of inclusion and exclusion. In their study on food provisioning during the full lockdown in Wuhan, China, the originating point for COVID-19, Henrici and Ju describe the importance of informal social networks at bridging food access gaps created by formal distribution channels. Registered community members received organized delivery of food and other resources while unregistered migrant workers and many people who were stuck in the region unexpectedly because of the winter holidays who had no claim to community resources went unaccounted for. Henrici and Ju found that getting resources to those in need and seeking resources through cellular phone apps communication that followed social relationships bridged these gaps in the acute points of lockdown providing essential access to food for a significant portion of the population. Government programs sometimes increased inequality during the pandemic. Both Henrici and Ju, as well as Lyall, Havice, and Colloredo-Mansfeld in their study on food access and security in Ecuador, detailed very strict national government responses in China and Ecuador. In both cases, the governments chose to inhibit open-air markets and smaller producers while prioritizing commercial groceries, and in both cases, inequality increased. Meanwhile, Hall’s thought-provoking article on wild food provisioning as a food security method in Appalachia during the pandemic notes that the existence of a program does not directly translate to actual impact as is the case with government-supported wild game distribution programs that distribute game to food insecure households in “almost every state in the U.S.” but complete very limited quantities of donations in comparison to meat harvested. The work of locating availability and gathering food safely during the pandemic is familiar for most readers in some form or another through personal experience. Provisioning work is often a productive space for thinking through structural inequalities, and the articles in this issue examine the topic through the lens of gender, race, and class. Henrici and Ju hypothesized that there would be a distinct gendered pattern to provisioning activities in Wuhan, but they ultimately determined that socioeconomics was more significant as a predictor. In interviews, they learned from participants that they often used new forms of technology to redistribute provisions to those excluded from formal channels of distribution through charity and through entrepreneurship, selling items in makeshift marketplaces created using their cellular phones. In studying pandemic responses that leverage traditional forms of provisioning, Hall reminds us that even subsistence strategies such as hunting carry sociopolitical power is unevenly distributed. Here he writes that land “entangles the realities of race and… ownership, which, has implications for who has access to wild food provisioning spaces…. Outside of reservation and treaty lands, Indigenous people have been completely dispossessed of their homelands with broad and ongoing negative impacts to Indigenous foodways. Black folks have and continue to be deliberately excluded from land use self-determination through white violence, perhaps most notably during the post-emancipation and reconstruction eras in the U.S.” Intentionally making use of the disruptions from the pandemic as an opportunity for their ongoing work, Lyall, Vallejo, Colloredo-Mansfeld, and Havice describe how some urban collectives and neighborhood organizations in Ecuador made gains in shifting circulation patterns of agroecological foods to reach low-income urban neighborhoods. Technology plays an important role in all the case studies and even in the way that much of this research was enacted safely and in semi-novel ways during the pandemic. Some of the studies in this issue were in progress when the pandemic began, while others worked to use their research skills to help or learn something about the unprecedented global experience that has left more than 5 million people dead as of December 2021. Research during and after a disaster always presents additional ethical and logistical challenges to human subject research, and anthropologists were quick to recognize that the pandemic exponentially increased these challenges (Marino et al. 2020). All studies in this collection contribute examples of methods during and for crisis. Burch and Legun moved their research online with participants that they had already established rapport with, while O’Connell et al. opted to recruit and interview study participants online and socially distanced in-person meetings as each participant preferred. Henrici and Ju describe the difficulty of communicating over government authorized digital platforms with study participants declining to continue once they moved online due to privacy concerns. The changing nature of COVID-19 information and networks for locating and mobilizing resources in this special issue showed variations across our food systems worldwide, which exist in states of global hyperconnectivity and surprisingly intimate local linkages. Technology became both a barrier and a bridge to existing and newly formed knowledge networks across several of the studies. In Ecuador Lyall, Vallejo, Colloredo-Mansfeld, and Havice found that the changes many agroecological organizations using digital technologies made to meet consumer demands increased distribution by up to 400%. Yet the same innovations were ultimately unsustainable when traditional markets reopened, and demand receded. Detailing the important flexibility of these agroecological organizations’ ability to meet people’s needs during an acute time and then return to pre-COVID or slightly elevated levels is an important case for responsiveness function as an important feature of meeting challenges to food systems. Difficulties in learning or accessing the technology platforms were also presented as a barrier for some in both Henrici and Ju and O’Connell, Gay, McDonald, and Tayal’s studies. In contrast, Lewis’ American Indian foodpreneurs likely reached a larger audience by moving to an online YouTube format and expanding accessibility beyond the immediate campus community. Technological innovations were most successful when they fulfilled a widely recognized need. Schneider and Gugganig contend that the success of the digital platforms for recruiting new farm to laborer relationships was bolstered by the cultural value for German hops by citizens. Across the case studies, the examples of technology adoption and innovation are numerous, but the ethnographic details of how and in what form such changes came about are just as important for thinking through staying power and weighing potential adaptive capacity of these changes. This special issue’s articles also detail methodological innovations that researchers may find useful as the pandemic continues and as other crises unfold. The joy of organizing the authors and editing this special issue for me has been in seeing remarkable synergies between their works unfold. This collection of articles presents strong cases for rejecting common dichotomies used within food systems studies (either production or consumption) and for framing sustainability in agriculture (large-scale multinational versus local and small-scale). Through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic, or “being in the [COVID-19] world” as Heidegger might say, these cases emphasize the importance of maintaining diverse forms of production, consumption, and policies and the bodies that enact them that have meaning well beyond the pandemic context. Most importantly, the subject that we did not coordinate but hums with an insistent energy through all the articles, is the clear imperative for justice and equality. Food insecurity can never truly be addressed without also addressing food sovereignty and justice. Lewis argues for this as a “new mode of food sovereignty research” that leads with the political context for Indigenous people, in contrast to less politically oriented classic food studies. Similarly, food justice work, and its sometime allied field of environmental justice, have long been driven by the work of Black, brown, and Indigenous scholars, organizers, and activists (Garth and Reese 2020). What this special issue makes clear is that no resilient food system is achievable without redressing systemic inequality and attending to justice in every element of our research, production, consumption, and access for humans and the environment alike. As you explore this special issue, I urge you to read individual articles as contributions to a plurality of ways forward through the array of problems our food systems face from climate change and the deeply rooted inequality for people and the environment entwined in the politics and practice of food making, eating, and meaning. The bright spots and innovative responses to challenges from COVID-19 within this issue underscore our humanity as complex but warm and capable of grappling with the contradictions embedded in our food systems laid bare during the pandemic. Ethnography, when done well, is a powerful tool for meeting this imperative as anthropologists and ethnographic work in allied disciplines gather, amplify, and focus human experiences with attention to justice for everyone. Collectively, this special issue sets forth a compelling research agenda that centers justice and challenges inequality across research design, implementation, and dissemination. This collection calls for work and action on food, labor, environmental health, and policy that we invite you to join, for our shared food futures.

Bioeconomy Opportunities for a Green Recovery and Enhanced System Resilience

Across the world, populations are facing severe threats and rising inequalities due to a combination of climate change, environmental degradation, COVID-19 and conflict. Food systems, as a result, are in crisis and people are increasingly feeling the impact on their everyday lives. For women, globally and across regions, the impact of the food systems crisis is more severe than for men, and women are more food insecure than men. Women, historically and now, have less access to healthy food, land ownership and resources for food production than men. Gender inequalities are woven through food systems, and contribute to unjust food production, access and consumption. Global food systems organizations are working to address some of the critical issues facing populations’ access to food and nutrition. The second annual Global Food 50/50 Report assesses whether and how such organizations are integrating gender and equality considerations in their work. It reviews the policies and practices of 51 organizations as they relate to two interlinked dimensions of inequality: inequality of opportunity in career pathways inside organizations and inequality in who benefits from the global food system. The primary aim of the Global Food 50/50 Report is to encourage food systems organizations to confront and address gender inequality both within their organizations and governance structures, and in their programmatic approaches across food systems. A second aim is to increase recognition of the role that gender plays in who runs and benefits from food systems for everybody: women and men, including transgender people, and people with nonbinary gender identities. Key findings from this year’s report show that gender and geographic diversity are severely lacking in the boards of major global food organizations, with leadership positions dominated by men from the global north. This matters because representation from a narrow section of the global population will not result in policies and programmes that meet the needs and interests of all people, across all regions, including women. The review of board composition of 51 organizations showed that more than 70% of board seats are held by nationals of high-income countries. Just 8% of board seats are held by women from low- and middle-income countries. However, there is room for hope. Our findings show an increase in women board chairs from 26% in 2021 to 35% in 2022. More organizations are publishing board diversity policies—policies were found in 30% of organizations, a 10% increase since 2021. Moreover, the review located five new board diversity policies across the sample. A high proportion of organizations (49/52) have made formal and public commitments to gender equality and this has increased since 2021. In 2022, there was an increase of five organizations with gender-transformative programmatic approaches, from 60% to 70% and a decrease in the number of organizations with gender-blind approaches. Despite some advances among some global food systems organizations, the sector has a long way to go to achieve gender equality in the boardroom, in the workplace and in who benefits from their work. The data in this report can equip leaders at all levels—from communities to workforces to boards—to take action, drive change, measure progress, and hold those in power accountable to their commitments to advance gender equality and transform food systems. A fairer, more gender-equal system will be best placed to end hunger, poverty, and inequality around the world.

Science Frontiers in Agronomy, Crops, and Soils

Shaping future food system leaders

Food systems science for peace and security: Is research for development key for achieving systematic change?