The concept of resilience, in the context of food system sustainability, refers to the ability of the food system to cope with and recover from socio-economic or environmental shocks and pressures. A resilient system has a certain degree of toughness and is able to bounce back against or adapt to disturbances. A resilient food system, for example, is able to keep providing food or other outputs such as livelihoods for farmers, drinking water, and biodiversity conservation under conditions of drought, a drop in food prices, war, climate change, the spread of virus in plants or animals, and so on. Resilience can be thought of at different scale levels. For example, what may be considered as resilient on a national level may not be understood to be resilient at a farm level. While some see resilience as synchronous with sustainability, others point out that a resilient system may also be one that resists needed transformation; an unsustainable status quo may in fact be resilient to change.
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