Flagship Update: Food System Resilience
Througout 2021, the Flagship Project Enhancing Resilience in Food Systems continued to move forward, holding stakeholder workshops and publishing results aimed at creating operational approaches for decision-makers to design food systems resilience.
The Flagship Project ‘Enhancing Resilience in Food Systems’ seeks to directly contribute to food systems resilience by supporting decision-making in practice through stakeholder participation in case studies and academic education. The project was initiated in 2014 and is led by World Food System Center member Johan Six. Support for the multiple subprojects comes from a wide range of food system actors, such as the Swiss Federal Office for Agriculture (FOAG), the UN FAO, multi-national companies and organizations, and academic partners. Here are some updates from 2021.
RUNRES
In 2021, despite significant challenges presented by the ongoing global pandemic, the diverse and dedicated collection of community members, municipal leaders, and researchers that are the ‘The rural-urban nexus: Establishing a nutrient loop to improve city region food system resilience’ (RUNRES) project have continued their efforts to improve the resilience of city region food systems in Arba Minch, Ethiopia, Kamonyi, Rwanda, Bukavu, DRC, and Msunduzi, South Africa. This project, funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), seeks to enhance resilience by capturing and processing sources of local organic waste into sustainably produced organic fertilizers. Across every part of the food value chains in these four city regions, the RUNRES team, informed and guided by a transdisciplinary process that prioritizes community input and co-knowledge production, has invested in innovations that have the potential to improve environmental and human health while also providing new economic and livelihood opportunities. Although the project has faced setbacks and challenges, in every city region the selected innovations are moving forward and beginning to show the potential of this alternative approach to city-region resource flows.
Resilience of the Swiss Food System
Elena Monastyrnaya successfully completed her doctoral research project ‘Resilience of the Swiss Food System.’ The project collected insights for the milk, beef, wheat, and wine value chains in Switzerland through stakeholder interviews, workshops, and surveys. Results aim to help various actors of the Swiss food system in decision-making regarding resilience and were communicated to project’s stakeholders in a workshop in October 2020, and then, in January 2021, to experts of the Federal Office for Agriculture (FOAG). Download final report
Assessing the role of organic value chains in enhancing food system resilience
The project ‘Assessing the role of organic value chains in enhancing food system resilience’ (OrRes), led by William Thompson, is in its final stages. A collection of the project’s findings can be found in William’s doctoral thesis ‘Enhancing Smallholder Farmer Climate Resilience in Cocoa and Banana Global Food Value Chains’. Outputs and recommendations from the project were shared with key stakeholders including farmers, farmer organisations, certifiers and retailers.
Operationalizing resilience in the face of climate change
The research project of Kenza Benabderrazik ‘Operationalizing resilience in the face of climate change: The case of tomato producers in Morocco and Ghana’ came to an end in 2021. Insights and results of this research will be used and discussed for the World Food System Center professional short course ‘Designing for Food system resilience: A circular approach’ in March 2022. A publication in external page Agricultural Water Management focused on agricultural intensification and water conservation, using the case of tomato producers in Morocco.
Resilience of Tef and Cacao Value Chains
The project ‘Assessing and enhancing the resilience of the tef and cocoa value chains’ (AERTCvc) aimed to jointly build strategies with key stakeholders in Ethiopia and Ghana for enhancing the resilience of these value chains. Recent efforts focused on the role of motivation to implement measures to enhance farmers’s resilience. The results of the study conducted by Braida Thom and Luzian Messmer have been recently published in external page Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change.