Food Systems Resilience

presents advocates and policymakers with a suite of policy tools for strengthening food system resilience. Food systems include food production, distribution, and preparation functions. They also include the farmers, ranchers, fishers, and foragers who produce food, along with the eaters who consume it and all the people who connect those groups to each other. Food systems have always been vulnerable to hazards like pests and bad weather, which can disrupt the smooth functioning of many interconnected components. With climate related shocks and stressors adding to existing hazards facing food systems, this is a critical time to examine food system vulnerabilities and work to ameliorate them. Increasingly, policymakers and scholars alike are turning to the concept of resilience to predict, assess, and improve how systems and the actors within them cope with disruption.

This report considers the question of food system resilience from a policy perspective. There are two broad goals embedded within the report’s five sections. The first goal is to provide food system advocates and policymakers with a primer on the current state of resilience thinking, especially as it applies to food systems. The second goal of the report is to present a suite of policy tools for strengthening food system resilience.