Symposium on American Food Resilience: Part 2

The security of the U.S. food supply faces unprecedented challenges due to changes in our food system and the environment during recent decades. The 27 articles in the Symposium on American Food Resilience examine the resilience of food production and distribution—the system’s ability to withstand shocks or stresses that could lead to disruption of the food supply. Four central questions provide a framework:

1. What are the main lines of vulnerability and how do they function?
2. What are leverage points for reducing the risks and improving the capacity to cope with breakdowns?
3. What is already being done by government, civil society, and the private sector?
4. What can scientists, teachers, and other professionals do through research, education, community action, or other means to make the food system more resilient?

The symposium is in two parts. Part 1, which was published in the last issue of this journal, laid out a conceptual framework and surveyed the problems. Part 2, which is in this issue, focuses on solutions. Paradigm shift is a major theme in Part 2. It revolves around two key ingredients:

1. Conflict between the prevailing “industrial” paradigm and sustainability
2. The scale of food-system operations and the contribution that more resilient regional food systems can make to the security of our food supply

Concrete details are provided by case studies from New England, Ohio, North and South Carolina, and Wisconsin, where researchers or nonprofit organizations have collaborated with food-system practitioners to strengthen and diversify regional food production and food-supply chains. A case study from Washington applies the diversity perspective to a strategic analysis of regional capacity for disaster response. Resilience planning in Australia features strategic policy analysis with quantitative techniques such as linear programming optimization and system dynamics, which can profitably be employed elsewhere as well. Together, the symposium articles provide a bounty of material that can be mined by researchers, teachers, policymakers, farmers, and other food-system practitioners for application to their own circumstances.

Food systems are social-ecological systems essential for human life. Many food systems are in parallel operation globally, differing in their practices, impacts, use of knowledge, and resilience. Those that are adapted to local constraints and assets and intentionally use and preserve ecosystem services result in lower environmental impacts and are less prone to lead to catastrophic environmental thresholds. Actors within food systems are constantly changing their practices to adapt to pressure and perturbations. Changing activities are correlated with changes in knowledge systems as well. Contributions to the resilience of social-ecological systems have been identified and evaluated, primarily based in ecosystem studies. Many of these attributes, such as memory, learning, and self-organization, have to do with forms of knowledge. This paper suggests characteristics of “resilient knowledge” and links it with enabling power to make needed changes. How can this enabling power allow social organizations from the community to the international scale to build resilience to all kinds of perturbations into their food systems and create the knowledge systems that resilience requires? This paper compares knowledge generation, transmission, access, and use in four food-system domains—global industrial, independent commercial, local and sustainable, and fair trade—discriminated on dimensions of globalization and multifunctionality. The objective of these comparisons is to understand connections among the resilience of food systems, food security, and knowledge systems. The paper concludes with a case study of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), hosted by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The CFS embodies and facilitates many of the attributes of resilient knowledge generation and access; some of the tensions within the CFS reflect whether knowledge used by the Committee will have attributes of resilient knowledge. I argue that forms of knowledge generation, transmission, and access must be participatory, multi-actor, iterative, and transparent in order to build food-security resilience. I also argue that knowledge at multiple scales must be resilient and interlocking in order to protect social organizations from food shortages and impaired food security.

Urban consumers in vested cities are typically divorced from the landscapes and farmers that produce their food. Most food is made available to these consumers via global retail systems, operating within an overarching paradigm of industrial commodity production. This paradigm induces one-way flows of resources from rural hinterlands to cities, with farmers undercompensated for their services—a process which is inherently unsustainable and unjust. By unwittingly eroding processes upon which they are utterly dependent, urban consumers are making themselves vulnerable. Potentially, this vulnerability could be reduced if urban food consumption was linked to regional production, but for many cities, the volumes of food required do not match regional output. Framed using a human ecological systems-based template, this paper presents case studies of three cities that have contrasting relationships with their regional food-producing landscapes. Canberra, Australia, could not consume all its regional production and so is in food surplus. Tokyo, Japan, could not meet its consumption needs from its region and so is in food deficit. Copenhagen, Denmark, could probably meet its needs from its region but chooses to reduce its food-producing land area and focus production on high-value meat products from pigs fed on imported low-value grains. Despite their differing food-procurement strategies, producers and consumers in all three cases remain codependent upon each other and vulnerable to the processes being driven by the industrial paradigm. Consequently, a shift to a new “biosensitive” paradigm is required, within which the social and environmental aspects of food production and consumption would be respected. This paradigm shift would reduce food choice and convenience and likely increase cost, so what would motivate consumers to support it? The answer suggested is that consumers could embrace the new food system if it had features that they valued sufficiently to compensate for the forgone values of the old system. Features that consumers could positively value include personal skills in the creation of meals, knowledge of the provenance and production standards of ingredients, and convivial relationships with producers. Pragmatically, these values are most likely to arise from consumers interacting with local food systems. Hence, it is argued, the primary value of local food systems lies not in the absolute volumes of food that they produce but in their educative capacity to foster a shift to a biosensitive paradigm. This new paradigm could extend concern to all food-producing landscapes and farmers, wherever on the planet they were located.

The twenty-first century challenges of climate change and resource scarcity bring a new urgency to the widely recognized sustainability challenges of the US food system. Environmental and social impacts associated with the geographic concentration and specialization in production, processing, and distribution that accompanied industrialization of the US food system have degraded our nation’s capacity to adapt to changing climate conditions. A consensus is emerging in sustainable food-system scholarship that two fundamental changes—a transformation of production methods from industrial to sustainable and a transformation of food-system geography from regional specialization to regional diversity—should enhance the resilience of the food system to climate change. A review of the literature suggests that transition to a nationally integrated network of sustainable metropolitan food systems, or “metropolitan foodsheds,” would improve climate resilience by enhancing three key qualities associated with resilience in social-ecological systems: diversity, modularity, and balanced accumulation of capital assets. These qualities promote the capacity of a system to respond, to recover, and to transform in ways that reduce damaging effects and take advantage of opportunities created by change. Using a set of behavior-based resilience indicators in a review of case-study research, this article examines the general resilience of sustainable production and supply-chain systems. Sustainable production systems managed by award-winning sustainable food producers expressed all of the behaviors of a resilient system and demonstrated remarkable resilience to weather variability and extremes. These producers attributed the climate resilience of their farms and ranches to high-quality soils, planned biodiversity, and diversified marketing. Like many sustainable producers, these farmers and ranchers not only produce crops and livestock, they also participate in processing, distribution, and retailing. Resilient behavior was also expressed in sustainable supply chains developed by networked community cooperatives and through government investment in a large nonprofit food terminal. As recent food-system planning projects in the USA illustrate, there is growing recognition of the potential sustainability and resilience benefits of regional food systems designed to develop positive relationships between the metropolitan core and surrounding areas. We can begin now to shift public support for a transition to more diversified production, to develop regional food-system infrastructure, and to conduct comprehensive research to refine resilience indicators and develop food-system performance metrics to guide a transformation of the US food system to a more sustainable and resilient future.

This article explores problems and solutions in the New England groundfish fishery, where social, economic, environmental, and food-system sustainability are major challenges. With industrialization of fishing during the past century, managers have turned a blind eye to issues of scale, such as industrial scale versus community scale, which has led to chronic overfishing. There have been recurring stock collapses of favored species such as cod during the past 50 years despite federal government management of the fishery during most of that period. Small- and medium-scale fishermen—with better local knowledge, motivation for local sustainability, and smaller ecological footprints—have increasingly been displaced by large-scale operations, especially during recent years with policies that are privatizing fisheries access and consolidating the fleet. Coastal fishing communities and the fishery have suffered. The Fish Locally Collaborative (FLC)—an international decentralized network of fishermen and their allies—is promoting a paradigm shift. Its efforts to keep the smaller-scale boats afloat and support local communities include economic and political strategies. Defining value with quadruple bottom-line accounting—assessing social, economic, environmental, and food-system impacts—the FLC promotes a shift from high-volume, low-value production to low-volume, high-value production. The FLC has reestablished local food-supply chains with community-supported fisheries, public seafood markets, and “boat-to-hospital” and “boat-to-school” programs based on procurement contracts that specify local and sustainable catch. FLC participants promote the consumption of lesser-known fish species to motivate more balanced and ecologically sustainable fishing. Politically, FLC participants continue to build the strength of the network and engage in policy discussions at local, national, and international levels.

Biological and agricultural diversity are connected to food security through strengthened resilience to both anthropogenic and natural perturbations. Increased resilience to stress via increased biodiversity has been described in a number of natural systems. Diversity in food production can be considered on the following three levels: (a) genetic diversity as reflected in the range of cultivars which can be selected for production; (b) species diversity, captured through production of a wide range of crops on each farm; and (c) broad ecosystem diversity, described by the diversity of production between farms and within the broader food system. A network of locally based food producers and entrepreneurs provides opportunity for high diversity at each network stage, with increased adaptive capacity and the ability for rapid response to disturbance. We argue that production techniques that use carefully planned diverse plantings, such as biointensive cultivation, increase resilience by increasing water-use efficiency, yield and nutrient retention while reducing pressure from pests and pathogens. We present a model for a diverse, distributed food system in the North Carolina Piedmont and analyze an existing distributed network by a food hub in South Carolina. Through these models, we argue that a shift in the food network has the potential to increase local food security by having food more reliably available where it is needed and by contributing to local resilience through community economic development. The shift in food-production and distribution systems serves multiple goals: when crop loss occurs, other crops still contribute to overall harvest, reducing net loss. Diverse on-farm production can support a more distributed network of food aggregators, processors, and markets than the current approach of large-scale consolidation. Finally, a distributed food-supply network supported with diverse agricultural products can increase resilience by providing access to diversified markets for producers and improved food access to consumers with more food choices, while expanding the need for skilled jobs supporting the regionally based food industry.

This paper lays out the relationships between three mutually reinforcing concepts associated with agroecosystems: (1) agroecosystem health, the extent to which an agroecosystem can meet human needs for all of its residents over time; (2) resilience, the capacity of a system to adapt, reorganize, and maintain key functions in the face of turbulent and unpredictable change in its environment; and (3) food security, sufficient quantity and quality of food for everyone at all times. Agroecosystem health has been defined by a number of properties including stability, sustainability, equitability, productivity, and autonomy, each in the context of specific spatial and temporal scales. Indicators that characterize biophysical and social conditions including soil health, biodiversity, topography, farm economics, land economics, and social organization can be combined using analytical hierarchy process to map agroecosystem health across a landscape. The resulting map may provide incentive and guidance for improving the conditions underlying agroecosystem health. Resilience and agroecosystem health overlap largely because both rely on diversity, in biological and physical as well as human cultural, social, and economic terms. The Agroecosystems Management Program at The Ohio State University has approached research and outreach to improve agroecosystem health, resilience, and food security by encouraging self-organizing social networks for economic development around local and regional agricultural supply chains, encouraging farm enterprise diversity at a wider range of farming scales, and conducting research to monitor and estimate the benefits of such diversification. Social media tools have been explored for connecting entrepreneurs at the planning stage, with the ultimate goal of improving the economic support for more diversified enterprises in agroecosystems. Although challenging, such adaptive management experiments may create and encourage new opportunities for managing agroecosystem health and, with it, resilient food production and security.

Seed exchange is a multidimensional issue with social, political, economic, and agricultural implications. There is a growing concern about the increase of the food system’s vulnerability as a result of loss of agricultural biodiversity. Farmers’ ability to replant, exchange, and distribute saved seed is a way to minimize their dependence on commercial suppliers and thereby maintain control over farming practices. Seed saving is also crucial for conservation because the process of choosing, replanting, and exchanging seeds relies on and increases diversity on the farm and in communities. Seed-exchange networks, formal and informal ways that farmers engage alongside institutional plant-breeding systems, help to conserve agricultural, social, and cultural diversity and identity as well as enhance resilience against environmental and economic shocks. However, how to build resilient seed systems and move from the innovative but relatively isolated project activities of professionals and farmers to a situation where such approaches are scaled up and networked alongside formal and informal, national and international plant-breeding mechanisms is a concern. This paper examines grassroots seed exchange through seed libraries, the marketing of new varieties through seed companies, and hybrid civil society-business models to understand their financial and technical abilities as well as challenges they face. Seed-exchange networks fulfill an important role in conservation of agricultural biodiversity and building community resilience through their work on breeding, exchange, and propagation of regionally adapted open-pollinated seeds as well as advocacy on seed sovereignty and education on seed saving.

Regionalism is a framework for economic, policy, and program development that responds to regional characteristics, differences, and needs and encourages regional approaches and solutions. This paper suggests that acting regionally contributes to food-system resilience. The author discusses attributes of regionalism and regional food systems and how they build capacity to withstand disruptions in the food system. Food-system resilience entails reducing vulnerability to risks of disruption to the food supply and increasing capacity to withstand or adapt to such disruption. Regions are an effective scale to promote resilience through enhanced diversity, stability, and flexibility, appropriately scaled supply chains and infrastructure, and strong foundational relationships. These attributes are important to resilience in that they decrease dependence on “external” variables, such as long-distance transport of foods, and increase “internal” capacity to provide for the region and withstand natural and human-made disruptions. The region is a powerful scale to respond to disruption in that it addresses supply—volume and diversity—better than local; is more nimble and flexible than nationally and globally sourced food, even accounting for global supply-chain “substitution”; and effectively fosters relationships, communication, and trust which are foundational for responding to change. This paper focuses on the New England region, whose six states have a history of working together. It is also a region that exemplifies an area’s ability to respond to disruption based on real and felt interconnectedness of rural and urban interests. As such, it is an ideal learning laboratory for applying regional approaches to food-system resilience, approaches that can be of use elsewhere both nationally and internationally. The paper describes several initiatives in New England that exemplify regional thinking applied to food systems and how such thinking can foster resilience. Initiatives focusing on regionally focused food-supply chains, increased regional production, access to farmland, and food-system public policies illustrate how government, civil society, and the private sector can collaborate to strengthen food resilience.

Concentration and consolidation in production, distribution, and retailing have arguably reduced the diversity of US food-supply and distribution channels, thus introducing vulnerabilities into the food system. This paper addresses the question of what can be done to make the system more resilient to shocks that can disrupt food supplies. We suggest that the interest connected to the local food movement extant in a wide-ranging set of public and private groups, as well as among a widening base of consumers, creates a unique opportunity to strengthen food-system resiliency. We specifically focus on the supply and distribution systems of supermarket retailers. Supermarkets are major drivers of the modern food system, with US and global consolidation positioning grocery retailers as both oligopolistic sellers and oligopsonistic buyers of food. We discuss the opportunities and challenges to diversifying supermarket procurement and distribution through localization and suggest that such a shift can be most successful if it is facilitated by public-private partnerships to foster system-level change. We provide an example of one such public-private partnership in the context of the work of the Center for Environmental Farming Systems—a collaboration between two North Carolina land-grant universities—which has partnered with a regional supermarket chain to facilitate and promote the sourcing of local products. The substantive activities of the partnership—capacity-building training for growers and buyers, networking and peer-learning activities and site tours, support for MBA research teams and undergraduate internships, and piloting and subsequent evaluation of novel distributional techniques—are ones that can be enacted by researchers, instructors, and advocates in partnership with supermarkets and other food businesses to build more resilient systems of food procurement and distribution. Discussion of the project provides tangible examples of how public and private entities holding shared interests in local agriculture can partner as part of a holistic approach to diversifying and strengthening the food system.

What can environmental scientists and teachers do to make our food system more resilient in times of rapid change and food-system failures? One low-cost and high-impact way is to encourage people to tell their stories of food and farming. Stories are one way we navigate complexity, and our food system is increasingly complex. Facilitating individuals and groups to talk about their experiences and direct observations is a powerful tool to help people understand their role in the food system. As each individual makes his or her own personal story explicit, they begin to listen to the stories of others and see how their daily choices shape the system. People are then in a position to better understand complexity and make conscious choices that support resilience and systemic change. We offer three cases in different contexts that illustrate how anyone can facilitate an adaptive response and what outcomes could be expected. The first case involves discussion of agricultural ethics in a children’s classroom setting. The second shares the experience of apple growers who wanted to reduce pesticide risk but were thwarted by management complexity. The third case brought together business leaders interested in making regional food systems more resilient. In these cases, narratives based on personal experience helped people understand their role as central actors in the food system and made them conscious of their responsibility for the health of the system. It encouraged their curiosity and interest in specific questions that scientific inquiry could address. Storytelling empowered people to act individually and collectively to make the food system more resilient within their spheres of influence and built the skills necessary for effective civic engagement on complex systemic issues.

Today’s domestic US food production is the result of an industry optimized for competitive, high-yielding, and high-growth production for a globalized market. Yet, industry growth may weaken food-system resilience to abrupt disruptions by reducing the diversity of food-supply sources. In this paper, we first explore shifts in food consumption toward reliance upon complex and long-distance food distribution, food imports, and out-of-home eating. Second, we discuss how large-scale, rapid-onset hazards may affect food access for both food-secure and food-insecure households. We then consider whether and how regional food production might support regional food resilience. To illustrate these issues, we examine the case of western Washington, a region not only rich in agricultural production but also threatened by a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake and tsunami. Such an event is expected to disrupt transportation and energy systems on which the dominant food-distribution system relies. Whether a regional food supply—for the purposes of this paper, defined as food production in one or adjacent watersheds—can support a broader goal of community food resilience during large-scale disruption is a key theme of our paper. The discussion that ensues is not meant to offer simplistic, localist solutions as the one answer to disaster food provision, but neither should regional food sources be dismissed in food-planning processes. Our exploration of regional farm production, small in scale and flexible, suggests regional production can help support food security prior to the arrival of emergency relief and retail restocking. Yet in order to do so, we need to have in place a robust and regionally appropriate food-resilience strategy. This strategy should address caloric need, storage, and distribution and, in so doing, rebalance our dependence on food supplied through imports and complex domestic supply chains. Clearly, diversity of food sourcing can add redundancy and flexibility, allowing more nimble food-system adaptation in the face of disruption.

Rising food prices and economic stagnation mean that access to affordable, nutritious food is a real problem, even in high-income countries such as the USA and Australia. It is claimed that urban agriculture (UA) reduces food costs and therefore has a role in improving household resilience during economic hardship. However, there is scant data to suggest that UA can appreciably improve household self-sufficiency in a crisis. This paper addresses the gap between claims and reality when it comes to UA actually reducing food costs. Using linear programming (LP), factors such as crop yields, food prices and inputs such as irrigation water can be quantified realistically, and an objective such as overall diet cost can be optimized. Constraints are applied to force the UA production regime to conform to a balanced diet. Subject to these constraints, optimization yields a best-case estimate of the outcome, so it can be seen to provide a “cautiously optimistic” result.

The model is run for a case study in Adelaide, South Australia, and results suggest a typical high-meat consumer could reduce their food cost by approximately 10% with substantial home food production, including intensive poultry rearing for meat. Meanwhile, a shift in diet toward vegetarianism would deliver twice the saving, with a further 10% achievable through UA. In the context of resilience, the results suggest that households could save a modest amount of money through dietary change and by growing some of their own food. The modeling revealed a trade-off between cost saving and self-sufficiency, measured as the percentage of home-grown dietary protein, but growing 10–15% of dietary protein on 40 square meters per person appears plausible without sacrificing financial savings. Optimization represents a quantitative framework that is suitable for a variety of extensions to help ground claims being made around UA and local food production, such as investigating the potential for reducing dependence on transport by provisioning food from within and around a city. The model would be greatly improved with more accurate data on yield, water and fertilizer inputs.

This paper outlines a process for exploring food-system vulnerability and resilience using scenario modeling with the Australian Stocks and Flows Framework (ASFF). The capacity of ASFF to simulate how diverse shocks and stressors affect food-system behavior across multiple sectors—with diverse, interconnected and dynamic variables shaping system response—renders ASFF particularly suited for exploring complex issues of future food supply. We used ASFF to explore the significance of alternative agricultural policies for land use, crop production, livestock production, fisheries, food processing, transport, food waste, and ultimately food supply. Policies in different scenarios varied with regard to the timetable for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, the degree of government participation or regulation in the food system, and the scale of solutions, varying from centralized and global to decentralized and local. Results from the scenarios suggest that Australia does not have the ability to maintain a domestic surplus of foods required for a nutritious diet. In particular, the health of the current food system is highly vulnerable to constraints in oil supply, and increased food production threatens to precipitate a drastic decline in critical water supplies. We conclude by outlining a proposed method for using ASFF to delve deeper into the dynamics of the food system, probe the consequences of various adaptive responses to food-production and supply challenges, and devise potential indicators for food-system resilience. Shocks and stressors to be added to the next phase of scenario modeling include soil salinity, climate extremes, and credit scarcity. The ASFF methodology should be applicable to other parts of the world, although appropriate recalibration and adjustment of model assumptions would be required to reflect regional differences.