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Review
. 2020;12(4):805-822.
doi: 10.1007/s12571-020-01076-1. Epub 2020 Jul 11.

Resilience of local food systems and links to food security - A review of some important concepts in the context of COVID-19 and other shocks

Christophe Béné  1
Affiliations
Review

Resilience of local food systems and links to food security - A review of some important concepts in the context of COVID-19 and other shocks

Christophe Béné. Food Secur. 2020.

Abstract

The objective of this review is to explore and discuss the concept of local food system resilience in light of the disruptions brought to those systems by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The discussion, which focuses on low and middle income countries, considers also the other shocks and stressors that generally affect local food systems and their actors in those countries (weather-related, economic, political or social disturbances). The review of existing (mainly grey or media-based) accounts on COVID-19 suggests that, with the exception of those who lost members of their family to the virus, as per June 2020 the main impact of the pandemic derives mainly from the lockdown and mobility restrictions imposed by national/local governments, and the consequence that the subsequent loss of income and purchasing power has on people's food security, in particular the poor. The paper then uses the most prominent advances made recently in the literature on household resilience in the context of food security and humanitarian crises to identify a series of lessons that can be used to improve our understanding of food system resilience and its link to food security in the context of the COVID-19 crisis and other shocks. Those lessons include principles about the measurement of food system resilience and suggestions about the types of interventions that could potentially strengthen the abilities of actors (including policy makers) to respond more appropriately to adverse events affecting food systems in the future.

Keywords: COVID-19; Food security; Food systems; Resilience; Shocks.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interestThe author declares no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Resilience causal pathway and the impact of COVID (modified from Béné et al. 2015)
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
a Ripple effect of responses throughout the supply chain (generic case). An initial shock (here a local drought) which direct effect may be restricted to the first groups (farmers and processors) may trigger responses and feedback effects all the way down to the consumers affecting everyone along the supply chain. b Ripple effect of responses throughout the supply chain in the case of the COVOD-19. Here the major sources of externality are the mobility restriction and lockdown imposed by the authorities which trigger major ripple effects throughout the food system, downward from the producers and upward from the consumers
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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