Andrea Cattaneo is a Senior Economist at FAO, leading the team that produces The State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA), which is FAO’s flagship publication. He has over 25 years of experience in examining economic issues relating to development, food security, and climate change. In recent years his focus has been on migration, resilience of agrifood systems, and the role of rural-urban linkages in rural transformation. The 2023 SOFA report focuses on revealing the true cost of food to transform agrifood systems. His research is guided by strategic considerations on obtaining concrete action, filling policy-relevant information gaps, improving policies, and developing innovative investment options for agricultural development and food security.
Andrea Cattaneo
My input based on the queries posed for the consultation:
Definitions adopted in the HLPE report will be key since resilience is a pretty generic concept that means different things to different people.
In FAO’s SOFA 2021 report, the resilience of agrifood systems was defined in a compact manner as:
“The capacity over time of agri-food systems, in the face of any disruption, to sustainably ensure availability and access to sufficient safe and nutritious food for all, and sustain the livelihoods of agri-food system actors.”
It was then broken down in practical terms into capacities to guarantee diversity in production, availability of food through multiple channels (including imports and stocks), physical access to food, and economic access to food. Indicators were then constructed to capture aspects of these capacities.
However different groups will define resilience in different ways, highlighting the multifaceted nature of resilience, encompassing anticipatory actions, economic stability, social protection, cultural preservation, and adaptive governance. Each group brings a unique perspective to the concept. Reconciling different definitions of resilience will involve integrating diverse perspectives into a cohesive framework., which can be challenging and will require choices about the scale of analysis (e.g. individuals, communities, value chains, national agrifood systems)
Food supply chains face various vulnerabilities that can significantly impact actors from input suppliers to consumers. Environmental vulnerabilities, such as climate change, natural disasters, and pest outbreaks, can disrupt production, cascading through the supply chain, causing job insecurity, and higher food prices, ultimately leading to increased food insecurity for consumers. Economic vulnerabilities, including market fluctuations, recessions, and trade restrictions, result in revenue instability for input suppliers, income reductions for producers, and market uncertainties for traders, while consumers face reduced purchasing power and access to nutritious food.
Social vulnerabilities, such as political instability, conflicts, and pandemics, further complicate the situation by causing operational disruptions, forced displacements, labor shortages, and exploitation risks for food system workers. Infrastructural vulnerabilities, including failures in transportation networks, storage facilities, and energy supplies, exacerbate these challenges by increasing logistical costs and causing delays in food delivery.
The final chapter of FAO’s SOFA 2021 report on resilient agrifood systems outlines potential ways to mitigate these impacts by diversifying supply sources, investing in resilient infrastructure, implementing adaptation practices, and strengthening social protection measures.
SOFA 2021, followed by an article published in Food Policy, highlighted how the greatest vulnerability for most countries is in economic access to food following a shock, even though availability and physical access to food could be important depending on the shock.
The paper in Food Policy highlighted how inequality in income is a driver of vulnerability in economic access to an energy-sufficient diet. We find that:
“… that for individuals struggling to afford an energy-sufficient diet, a one percent reduction in income inequality could provide a benefit 3 to 7 times that of a similar increase in mean income per capita.”
The above applies to income inequality across all sectors; however, the most recent SOFA report (2023) on the hidden costs of agrifood systems highlights how the largest hidden cost in agrifood systems in low-income countries is associated with poverty due to power imbalances for actors within agrifood systems.
The obvious that stands out is the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. However, while the Sendai Framework provides a comprehensive approach to DRR, it does not explicitly focus on food systems. There is a need for more detailed guidelines and strategies tailored specifically to the unique vulnerabilities and needs of agrifood systems. Also, based on SOFA 2021 on resilience, a stronger emphasis on the socio-economic dimensions of resilience in agrifood systems, such as addressing poverty, inequality, and the role of social protection (relative to the Sendai framework).
FAO has several strands of work that are more agrifood systems focused, which taken together can be viewed as a comprehensive framework, focusing on risk management, early warning systems, anticipatory action, sustainable practices, livelihood support, governance, and investment. These are summarized in FAO’s SOFA 2021report, produced in collaboration across all FAO divisions working on resilience aspects.
At the household and community level the Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis (RIMA) is probably the FAO work of reference. It includes dimensions such as access to basic services, livelihood strategies, social safety nets, and adaptive capacity.
At the more aggregate level FAO’s SOFA 2021 is a good source.
This is a challenging task. I advise to think through the definition of the components of resilience at each scale being analyzed so as to make sure that indicators are reflective of the definition being adopted.
SOFA 2021 is a good source for indicators of resilience at the national level: it has measure of resilience of agrifood systems transportation infrastructure for 90 countries (physical access to food), and for primary production, food availability and economic access to food for over 140 countries.
Not sure that there is an indicator that is effective in measuring resilience across different components. In FAO’s SOFA 2021, we provided an indicator for producers (Primary Production Flexibility Index), one for supply chain infrastructure proxied through transport system robustness, one for supply chain diversification (Dietary Sourcing Flexibility Index, scheduled to be included in FAOSTAT later this year), and one of economic access for consumers. Maybe these four indicators together can be used to assess the overall resilience agrifood systems. However, it should be noted that these are indicators of how vulnerable to disruption a specific part of an agrifood systems is, without providing any insight on how easily the component would recover from the disruption. This was a necessary choice to develop indicators that would be available for many countries.
In a nutshell, according to FAO’s SOFA 2021 report, the most common vulnerability across countries is in economic access to food following a shock. This was seen during the Covid pandemic when there was concern about food supply, but in the end food was available but many did not have the income to purchase food, requiring social protection programs to be put in place to face the challenge.
2. Understanding what we must be prepared for – the nature of shocks:
On the primary production side weather shocks, pests, and diseases are clearly extremely important. Here early warning systems and anticipatory actions are key.
I feel the vulnerability in economic access due to shocks, and how to link it to social protection program design, are two aspects that are understudied.
To me resilience is mostly about being able to face unknown and unforeseen shocks. This is the aspect of resilience that goes beyond risk management where events are known as is their likelihood.
The only way to enhance that kind of resilience is to have structural properties of agrifood systems that enable it recover from disruptions. This means a diversified supply of food, with diversified supply chains, good infrastructure, as well as stable incomes for consumers to be able to purchase nutritious food (with social protection programs where needed).
3. Understanding and mitigating trade-offs:
Building resilience into a system may involve tradeoffs. Diversity in supply chains may mean that efficiency is not being maximized. If markets are very competitive it may be difficult to sustain that diversity since the least efficient suppliers may go out of business.
When working on SOFA 2021 on resilience we found it very useful to think in terms of the different ways of framing FSN. SOFA 2021 developed indicators that try to capture element so food availability, physical access, and economic access. Also the distinction between energy-suffcient diets and healthy diets is a useful distinction to understand how shocks are affecting FSN, and what needs to be done. Our paper in Food Policy focused on the these two extremes when shocks occur.
4. Existing programmes and policies to promote resilience – a gap analysis of current strategies and recommendations:
The 2021 SOFA report recommends a comprehensive approach involving diverse strategies and stakeholder collaboration. In that report’s final chapter, a distinction is made between entry points tailored to coping with uncertainty (shocks difficult to foresee) and those adapted to managing specific risks (more predictable shocks). [see Table 5 in that chapter].
This is an item that is covered in some detail in the last chapter of FAO’s 2021 SOFA report.
Public policies could focus, in some countries, on improving access to credit and financial services, particularly for small and medium agri-food enterprises (SMAEs). Facilitating access to financial services allows these businesses to invest in resilience-building measures such as diversification of supply sources and production redundancies.
Also, facilitating the forming consortia or clusters can help SMAEs pool resources, overcome scale-related constraints, and improve access to markets and technologies. Ideally, governments should promote inclusive governance and broad participation, ensuring that small-scale producers and vulnerable households are integrated into the broader agri-food systems. This approach helps in creating synergies between efficiency, inclusiveness, and resilience.
That being said, including diversity & redundance in supply chains to increase resilience will lead in some cases to a trade-off in terms of overall efficiency. Addressing this trade-off will require creating an enabling environment that allows both shorter and longer supply chains to thrive, with a diverse mix of products sourced both locally and through international trade.
5. Share recent literature, case studies and data that could help answer the questions listed above.
Besides SOFA 2021 on resilience and it’s dataset, a few other recent sources (in a rapidly expanding literature):
Béné, C. and Devereux, S., 2023. Resilience and food security in a food systems context (p. 413). Springer Nature.
Béné, C., Frankenberger, T.R., Nelson, S., Constas, M.A., Collins, G., Langworthy, M. and Fox, K., 2023. Food system resilience measurement: principles, framework and caveats. Food Security, 15(6), pp.1437-1458.
Cattaneo, A., Sadiddin, A., Vaz, S., Conti, V., Holleman, C., Sánchez, M.V. and Torero, M., 2023. Ensuring affordability of diets in the face of shocks. Food Policy, 117, p.102470.
Schneider, K.R., Fanzo, J., Haddad, L., Herrero, M., Moncayo, J.R., Herforth, A., Remans, R., Guarin, A., Resnick, D., Covic, N. and Béné, C., 2023. The state of food systems worldwide in the countdown to 2030. Nature Food, 4(12), pp.1090-1110.