Foraging supply chains: Investigating disaster for improved food provisioning

Abstract

Disasters such as COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine war are drawing attention to the provisioning of food during crises. The main concern has been quickly establishing a stable food supply. However, climate change and public health concerns are shifting attention to the critical gap in identifying the minimal considerations that would adequately address ecological disaster food provisioning. A meta-ethnography of 16 disasters in 12 different countries is employed to identify the activities and their supporting strategies that provide benefits to existing actors within food networks. Analysis suggests that public health, resilience, and sustainability stand to benefit from the identified practices. A conceptual model of an ecologically embedded minimum viable ecosystem for disaster food provisioning is proposed. Exemplar applications are provided for Tigray, Gaza, and Ukraine. The findings may be applied to disaster settings for the development of policy for culturally sensitive, equitable, and nutritious food provisioning strategies.

Keywords: Ecological embeddedness; Food provisioning; Food supply chain; Foraging theory; Minimum viable ecosystem; Sustainable development.

Fig. 1

High-level application of OFT to existing food provisioning in a disaster region. Military resources may be used to deliver humanitarian supplies as indicated by the upper dashed lines. Diet breadth is inadequately considered (noted as N/A) with proposed models making assumptions such as every beneficiary (of a certain type in a humanitarian food supply chain) receives the same food basket, no beneficiary goes unfed, the modeled nutrition measure is a simple average across all nutrients, and that the supply chain network is fixed (e.g., Peters et al. 2021)

Fig. 2

A PRISMA flow diagram showing documents identified, screened, and included (Page et al. 2021)

Fig. 3

Conceptual model of a MVE for food provisioning under war-like conditions. Existing actors include humanitarian food supply chains, military supply chains, long and short supply chains. Solid arrows represent strong connections, whereas dashed arrows are weaker links (not always present)