Is our food supply at risk?

The economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, climate variability and extremes, conflict, and the persistence of hunger and malnutrition have shown us that now is the time for us to build more resilient agrifood systems.

If we don’t, agrifood systems will not be able to ensure food availability to all as well as physical and economic access to nutritious foods that make up healthy diets.

So, how can we protect our agrifood systems from shocks and stresses and better ensure nutritious food is available to all? In other words, how can we make our agrifood systems resilient?

Understanding agrifood systems

First, let’s look at what agrifood systems are. Before food reaches our plates, it travels a long way. It’s every stage of that journey – from harvest to consumption – that makes up our agrifood systems. They involve a set of interlinked activities that encompass farming, processing, transporting, eating and more.

Although often complex and international in scope, agrifood systems have three main components:

From farmers to truck drivers and beyond, agrifood systems involve many actors operating across different components. Shocks or stresses in any of these components can spread rapidly throughout systems and threaten the functioning of supply chains and the food security and nutrition of consumers.

Disaster strikes: How can agrifood systems absorb shocks and stresses?

The COVID-19 pandemic raised concerns that adequate food supplies would not reach consumers as supply chains faced multiple shocks and stresses.

Ensuring agrifood systems could perform well during the pandemic was a key concern, and these experiences have led to increased analysis of these systems. After all, the preservation of agrifood systems helps to ensure food security, nutrition and the livelihoods of millions of people.

The pandemic also created an opportunity to promote further interest in ensuring diversity and connectivity, both key for resilient agrifood systems.

Diversity is essential

Diversity – in production, output markets, import sources and supply chains – was a key resource during the pandemic because it created multiple pathways for absorbing the shock.

Why we need to act now

We know that any challenges to agrifood systems can affect large numbers of people. Currently, 41.9% of the global population are unable to afford a healthy diet. That’s over 3 billion people.

But what if there was a disaster or an economic shock?

An additional 1 billion people around the world are at risk of not affording a healthy diet if a shock caused their incomes to reduce by one-third.

Furthermore, food costs could increase for up to 845 million people if a disruption to critical transport links were to occur.

So, what can be done?

Resilient agrifood systems are key to ensuring that even greater numbers of people do not lose access to healthy diets.

For governments and policymakers, this can be achieved by:

ensuring diversity of food sources (from domestic production, to imports and existing stocks), and of actors in food supply chains;

managing connectivity, such as through the creation of robust food transport networks;

providing a longer-term development perspective that raises incomes;

improving productivity and efficiency to lower the cost of nutritious foods;

supporting livelihoods with gender and nutrition-sensitive social protection programmes.

To ensure the affordability of a healthy diet, either the cost of food must come down, or the incomes of the vulnerable population must increase or be supported through, for example, social protection programmes – or, ideally, both.

In addition, the resilience of rural low-income households can be significantly strengthened through education, non-farm employment and cash transfers.