With reference to the questions posed for response:
- 1. Purpose and Objectives: These are to focus on how food systems influence dietary patterns and hence nutritional outcomes. The paper's emphasis is on consumers but this should not be to the exclusion of production as part of food systems.
- 2. Structure and balance: The report is very comprehensive but probably too diffuse and needs tightening in later drafts to zero down on key factors. It is a bit like a long review of the literature at present. I agree with other suggestions to have appendices.
- 3. Conceptual framework: it is a good start with its definitions and lead-in to the development of a typology. The typology will provide the skeleton on which later versions and the impact of the report will depend for structure and support. However, “food environment” needs to be re-thought. As per the definition, environment is a part of the food system, not outside it. The systems approach needs strengthening. A system incorporates composition (or components), environment, structure, and mechanisms. For a given entity we want to know what it consists of, what the features are of the environment within which it functions, how it is arranged internally, and how it works. (Bunge, Mario, Emergence and Convergence. University of Toronto Press Inc. 2003). No entity, organism or system can exist independent of environment.
- 4. Production systems (sic.) adequately addressed? No, see Q.1&3. Production is part of the food system and not a separate system. This component of the food system has a major role in shaping diets and nutritional outcomes.
- 5. Controversies: There is a central controversy that the report does not adequately confront, but rather falls on one side of in its selection of sources. There should be more substance in the report on the food sovereignty debate as well as on systems that are based on small farmers. This is a core weakness of the report; small farm-based food systems that provide 80% of food in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (as referenced) are reduced to allusions to “vulnerable groups” (4.2.2). I support other comments made along these lines. The report as it stands contains bias.
- 6. Categorization of food systems: Farming systems thinking should be included. It is hardly touched on in the report, if at all, consistent with the gap I identify on the diversity of production systems. As per Figure 1, the overwhelming bias of the report this far is towards the industrial food system model. This is influenced by most of the early writing on food systems, which was grounded in industrial, market-oriented and consumption-based thinking about food. To be up-to-date, useful in the long term and analytically correct, climate and agro-ecosystem-based food production, and small farm-based food systems, must be part of the analytical framework, and thus the emergent typology. I treat measurement in my concluding comment below.
- 7. Balance in food systems: There is a lack of this as per responses 4. and 6. Also, the constraints faced by poor populations in trying to meet their nutritional needs should be highlighted more. I support other comments in the on-line debate along these lines. Further, the urban poor must be better included. Now they are lumped in as “consumers” in an under-developed classification of “urban”.
- 8. Strengthening / shortening: The typology will be the key to the success and impact of the report. Most other sections can be tightened, shortened, moved to appendices as suggested and bias removed as above (5).
- 9. Cases: I cannot provide cases which give evidence of policy impact on nutritional status. However, section 4 is generally weak and leaves no room for treatment of contingent factors that affect nutritional status. I can cite studies that demonstrate the impact of urban agriculture on food security and nutrition, including urban livestock, for example. Urban and peri-urban agriculture needs to be addressed somewhere.
- 10. Institutional changes and governance: Yes section. 4.2.2 is particularly weak and also biased, as noted above, item 5. Perhaps here is the place to introduce the strides that have been made on urban food governance, internationally (CFS-CSM, Milan Urban Food Policy Pact), nationally and at city level in both North and South (urban food policy councils, urban agriculture legislation and administration). While nutritional impacts have not been measured as yet, the policy intention is clear (Brazil, several African countries/cities). But the urban nutritional deficits and lack of access must be treated in earlier sections of the report as well, in order for this to cohere.
- 11. Balance in communication: The report is balanced regarding technicality, accuracy and communication. However, while some concepts are clearly defined, more conceptual development is needed, as above. While the initial boxed definitions are good, and grounded in previous work, the definition of diet (4) could be improved by including the concept of dietary diversity, perhaps in the second sentence, before moving to environmental impact?
- 12. Omissions and gaps: As above, production processes, agro-ecology and climate-based food systems incorporating small farmers must permeate the whole analysis which is slanted towards industrial value chains, including and especially Figure 1 and other later figures on food system interventions. The urban poor dimension of food and nutrition insecurity including urban and peri-urban agriculture is omitted as item 10 above. I have separately made a submission on critical and emerging issues in this respect. Finally, the treatment of soil quality and food production needs more depth and emphasis. This could be expanded upon in 3.2.1 which is very good on natural resource degradation and ecosystems, but needs to permeate other aspects of the paper as well (and should not be consigned to an appendix). In particular, the food system diagrams do not encompass waste in the ecological cycle “…production-processing-consumption-waste-production..” and so on. Nutrient cycling is an essential part of the food system, whether planned or unplanned (i.e. malfunctioning). The Milan urban food pact is likewise weak on this, only addressing food waste and not the cycling of waste and nutrients in the food system.
Overall comment and suggestion on developing the typology:
Starting from the excellent (and brief) treatment in Section 3.2.1 on Natural Resource Degradation and Ecosystems, which includes analysis of the homogeneity of world food supply (Fig. 16), I would like to suggest that this give direction to the search for a typology. What will be needed as an outcome of this work is a way of measuring and comparing food systems, specifically with regard to their impact on nutrition levels. After naming types that can form a nominal scale as a basis for comparison, it should be possible to interrogate these with quantitative data on variables that are amenable to measurement.
As included in Table 2, “percent imported foods / total food supply” could be a key variable to describe different food system types (not just countries and not just the production element as per Table 2). The types must include small scale peasant, regional market oriented, peri-urban and urban farming systems, in order for comparisons to be first made and subsequently measured in terms of nutritional impact. Necessarily, these will vary by agro-ecological zone. See the CFS-CSM typology of farming groups for example. Once the types are named and defined, a multiplicity of variables could be developed, measured and analysed now and in future.
This next step in developing the paper is central to its purpose and long term usefulness. The task is to establish the groundwork on food systems and nutrition. It must break free from analyses based in other discourses and become a benchmark for describing and analysing food systems.
Diana Lee-Smith