Resilient or Transformative? Contemporary Food Systems within an Evolving Policy Landscape

Dear Colleagues,

Faced with ever-growing world population and rising urbanization rates, contemporary food systems are expected to yield increasing produce of better quality, while their ability to deliver on resource efficiency and distributive equity is being constantly put into question. The very notion of the food system calls into play the many intertwined activities related to the production, processing, distribution, sale, preparation, and consumption of food, and requires an interdisciplinary and pluralistic understanding of economic dynamics, ecological processes, and social practices.

The ensuing frictions spur responses as diverse as calls for degrowth and conscious consumption, innovations in precision farming, sustainable agricultural intensification, or a more fundamental systems redesign following agroecological principles. Food and agriculture have taken a central role in sustainable development because they help focus on selected social practices and economic sectors while retaining a far-reaching integrative power. With respect to the sustainability discourse, these features of food are reflected, among many other processes, in the water–food–energy nexus approach, in the UN Agenda 2030’s Sustainable Development Goals (especially Goal 2 “Zero Hunger” and Goals 12 and 15) and in the EU Farm-to-Fork Strategy – adopted in 2020 along with the new Biodiversity Strategy to underpin the new Green Deal.

Underlying most inquiries and policies on the role of food systems is the idea that they must be radically transformed if they are to progress towards sustainability. However, at the same time, a deeper awareness of the uncertainty that affects long-term planning scenarios is gaining ground, and crises of diverse nature are drawing increasing attention to more reactive properties of socioecological systems of the like of adaptative capacity and, more recently, resilience. Hence, there is a perceived need to ensure that key social processes, economic activities, and ecological functions endure and persist in the face of shock, stress, or shifts. The challenges to be faced are as diverse as climate change, last decade’s financial crisis, and the contemporary health emergency triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, food systems find themselves in the uneasy position of being blamed for not changing fast enough to redress their current unsustainability while, at the same time, they are the target of key prevention, preparedness, and emergency policies to avoid disruption in food production and distribution, i.e., to maintain food systems as much as possible in their current configuration.

Another pivotal aspect of food systems is that they feature a marked territorial component. Not only do agricultural areas compete with other potential land uses (e.g., built-up land or forests), but each food system entails different farming practices and landscape arrangements which significantly affect the capacity of agricultural landscapes to be net consumers or suppliers of ecosystem services. Valuable cultural landscapes in different areas of the world are the result of long-lasting farming practices embedded in specific food systems, now often under threat from land abandonment or excessive intensification. Following the global reach of food value chains, changes in one component may trigger significant territorial transformation in other – even remote – parts of the food system, e.g., the increasing demand of fashionable foods in world cities can alter rural livelihood and land use patterns in the Global South. On the other hand, the viability of local food networks and alternative value chains may critically depend on innovations in territorial governance arrangements at regional and national levels.

Against this complex background, the aim of this Special Issue is to gather valuable contributions that would advance knowledge and learning on sustainable food systems and practices by investigating the role of both well-established policies (e.g., agricultural policies, rural development programs, spatial strategies) and innovative initiatives (urban food policies, climate adaptation plans, etc.) – with special regard to the implications for land use change, agroecosystem management, landscape conservation, and territorial governance.

Papers submitted to this Special Issue could therefore focus on the following topics, as well as on other relevant issues: 

- The handling of spatial and territorial aspects in contemporary urban food policies (e.g., as developed in the framework of the 2015 Milan Urban Food Policy Pact), both at a local level and within global food supply chains (e.g., telecoupling);

- The protection and enhancement of agroecosystem services in spatial and landscape planning and related policymaking processes;

- The links between food poverty in highly industrialized countries and food insecurity in less developed countries (for instance, in terms of land grabbing or food justice);

- The interlinkages between redesign of agroecosystems according to more ecological principles and the broader spatial organization and territorial planning of communities and regions;

- Critical reflections on, or examples of applications of, socioecological concepts with an explicit spatial component of the like of green and blue infrastructure to support local food systems;

- The synergies and conflicts between new resilience- or climate adaptation-oriented planning approaches and rural development programs;

- The revival of local food security strategies in industrialized countries (addressing, among other issues, agriculture’s economic vulnerability and land abandonment in contrast to land take and soil sealing);

- The integrative potential of food-centered territorial visions in spatial planning as compared to more articulated (e.g., the water–land–energy and food nexus) or all-encompassing frameworks (including the UN Sustainable Development Goals). 

Dr. Alessandro Bonifazi
Dr. Carlo Rega
Guest Editors

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• urban food policy
• sustainable food systems
• territorial governance
• urban–rural linkages
• spatial planning