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

The food systems approach helps to reveal the underlying structures of and relationships within the food system. Cause-effect patterns are enriched by feedback from other parts of the system that might otherwise be overlooked in the absence of a systematic approach. These insights help us to formulate the right entry points for policy. They can also generate an awareness that, alongside public interventions, the private sector itself can make a significant contribution to improving food system outcomes. Complementary efforts from the sector itself can safeguard both the minimum scale of interventions (societal) and the necessary return on investments (private economic). 

Certain unsatisfactory system outcomes (such as poverty, malnutrition, lack of training) can often be traced back to a number of root causes. Root causes are often location-specific. It is therefore important to properly analyze the origins of poverty, hunger, and/or malnutrition (i.e. what the precise limiting factors are) in the region/country in question, and to identify which parts of the food system are responsible for the problem and what options there are for policy interventions. When prioritizing policy options, it is essential to find out how interventions will contribute to food system sustainability, 

i.e. the long-term feasibility of the system in social, economic, and environmental/climatological terms. The food systems approach increases the prospects of both problem analysis and the search for ways of improving food system outcomes. In this way, food systems thinking helps to prioritize the different intervention pathways. 

The food systems approach offers not only a means to compare different intervention possibilities but also a framework for systematically analyzing the synergies and trade-offs between different policy objectives. Of course it must be said that the most recent literature in this field also recognises that the complexity of the food system makes it extremely difficult to precisely pinpoint the relationships and feedback mechanism between the different parts of the system (and with other systems) and to say what will work in order to improve system outcomes. Nevertheless, the framework does have a number of advantages. First, it provides a checklist for the topics that should in any event be addressed in order to improve food security, certainly in relation to other policy objectives, and it identifies the actors and other parties who should be involved. Second, it helps to document the impact of environmental and climate changes on food security by pointing out different vulnerabilities in the food system. In that sense the concept can help in the search for ways of enhancing the system's resilience to climate change. Third, it helps to determine the most limiting factors when it comes to achieving food security, and thereby to identify effective interventions aimed at improving food security. These advantages make it worthwhile to adopt a food systems approach within Dutch policy aimed at contributing to sustainable solutions for a sufficient supply of healthy food in the world.