What Price Resilience? Towards Sustainable and Secure Food Systems

Reference and summary as follows:

ISU, 2011.What price resilience? Towards sustainable and secure food systems. The Prince’s Charities’ International Sustainability Unit, London.

Summary

HRH The Prince of Wales established the International Sustainability Unit (ISU) to facilitate consensus on how to resolve some of the key environmental challenges facing the world. The ISU has just released a major report – What Price Resilience? – on the topic of food security. The report takes a broad and integrative approach, looking at the role played by economic development, energy, climate, biodiversity and ecosystem services in agriculture, fisheries and food systems. It analyses the deeper causes behind a global food crisis which has led to damaging price volatility and substantial increases in the number going hungry. It argues that these risks are likely to intensify in coming decades – more shocks and disruptions can be expected if we continue with ‘business as usual’.

The ISU commissioned original research on 8 agricultural and fishery production systems in developed and developing countries to quantify their social, environmental and economic impacts. Many of these systems were found to produce negative environmental externalities, to mine the soils, waters and ecosystems on which they depended, and to be vulnerable to future risks and shocks. Because of public subsidies and a failure to price environmental impacts, the market price of food often does not reflect the ‘true’ costs – or risks – of its production.

There is good news, however. The ISU report points to many examples of agro-ecological food production systems which deliver a range of positive social, environmental and economic goals, while being resilient to risks and disruptions. The challenge will be scaling them up. Sustainable and resilient food systems will look different from place to place, so a key task will be to develop analytical tools that can help assess performance against multiple goals. Above all, the report points to the need to change the economic framework in which food producers operate. Subsidy reform, new taxes, regulations and market mechanisms, payments for ecosystem services – all these measures can help internalise the costs of natural capital depletion and incentivise more resilient practices.

You can download the report here.