The Food Systems Approach: Sustainable Solutions for a Sufficient Supply of Healthy Food

Food systems comprise all the processes associated with food production and food utilization: growing, harvesting, packing, processing, transporting, marketing, consuming, and disposing of food remains (including fish). All these activities require inputs and result in products and/or services, income and access to food, as well as environmental impacts. A food system operates in and is influenced by social, political, cultural, technological, economic, and natural environments. 

Because the nature and operation of food systems is determined by many factors, the FSA can be studied from the perspective of a range of disciplines (including anthropology, sociology, economics, and geography). The literature on the subject is not always entirely clear and complete in terms of the attention paid to all the processes that are part of the food system. Whereas HLPE places a good deal of emphasis on reducing food loss and waste in the food system and UNEP focuses on the food system's interaction with natural resources and the environment, the Global Panel and HLPE emphasize the role of the consumer: it is consumers who determine what the system produces. According to the latter two publications, food culture (values, convictions, and social norms regarding food) plays a key role in what people eat. Incomes and other socio-economic characteristics in a society also determine to a significant degree the choice of food, as does, for example, knowledge of the relationship between nutrition and health. In addition to sufficient quantities of food, food systems should in particular produce healthy food ('healthy diets'), and the Global Panel report suggests how interventions in food systems can bring that goal a step closer. 

The food systems approach describes the different elements in our food system and the relationships between them. It looks on the one hand at all the activities relating to the production, processing, distribution, and utilization of food, and on the other hand at the outcomes of these activities in terms of food security (including nutrition), socio-economics (income, employment) and the environment (biodiversity, climate). In this paper we do not opt for a single definition of food systems but we attempt to do justice to the different definitions by emphasizing the breadth of the FSA and to show, using examples from different perspectives (in other words, the activity leading to better access to healthy food, or the main driver of change leading to a response in the food production system), how it can be applied in practice. 

A defining feature of systems thinking is that it views the behavior of a system as an interplay of interacting subsystems, in which feedback plays a key role, rather than as a simple chain of cause and effect relationships. This also distinguishes systems thinking from other approaches such as farming systems, sector, or chain approaches, in which interventions are often designed to make optimum use of the means of production (natural resources, labor, capital). This usually involves applying technological innovations at the level of family businesses, sectors, and/or chains, with the focus on raising productivity and profitability. Although those approaches also analyze the impact of interventions on the market (prices, incomes) and environment (CO₂ emissions), and the depletion of natural resources (such as erosion or water shortage), they tend to pay insufficient attention to feedback from the socio-economic system and/or ecosystem to the farm, sector or chain. Food systems thinking steps back as it were from the place where the intervention occurs, thereby providing an opportunity when analyzing the outcomes of policy interventions to include feedback from outcomes outside the activities that relate directly to food production and consumption. This also makes an FSA a useful perspective in the literature on the resilience (robustness) of the food production system, which is about the capacity of the system to absorb shocks, such as an animal disease crisis or trade boycott. Climate change is an example of a 'shock' with a long-term dimension. The sustainable use of natural resources in relation to the growing need for food is a key focus in the literature on resilience and ways are being sought to make food production less vulnerable to these shocks. The solution approaches emphasized in this literature include the need for climate-smart agriculture (a combination of increasing agricultural productivity and reducing greenhouse gas emissions), supplemented by policy aimed at trade, supplies, and nutrition, and social policy options. This is because the availability of food does not guarantee that people can also access it. Integrated system solutions are advocated, in which an FSA – because of its holistic nature – is a more appropriate analytical framework than an approach that focuses solely on the production component. 

In the ecology and economic discipline, the term resilience is used to indicate the ability to cope with perturbations and the rate and speed of recovery after their occurrence. Resilience thinking has been applied to a wide variety of social-ecological systems, also in studies dealing with the behavior of agricultural systems facing various kinds of perturbations, most frequently as the ability of agricultural systems to preserve their intrinsic functions through flexibility. In these cases, resilience is mainly used to discuss the factors that build the ability of agricultural systems to respond to changes, to reorganize their structure, to anticipate future changes, and to take advantage of new opportunities.