Resilience perspectives in global food systems - Exploring variability, localness and diversity

Global food production and food availability has increased remarkably since the Green Revolution due to, for example, technological improvements in food systems. Despite the increase in production capacity, the food system's resilience is challenged by a multitude of systemic and environmental disruptions, as well as natural variation. To build stable and sufficient food systems, these disruptions have to be taken into account. While global food systems are frequently assessed from the perspective of physical food availability, such straightforward approach is rarely enough to capture the very the complex nature of food. Thus, this dissertation investigates various perspectives of resilience of global food availability and variability by using novel data-driven spatial assessments. Additionally, it examines the use of agricultural inputs in Finland, drawing attention also to the intricacies of a single country, which are not feasible to assess in global scale studies. The dissertation found substantial variation in lower-than-average crop yields between regions and climatic systems. The results also showed that anthropogenic indicators such as human development index, or fertilizer application rates explain 40-60% of the variation in lower-than-average crop yields but only 5-20% in mean yield anomalies during climatic shock years. Furthermore, the dissertation demonstrated that even with a theoretically optimum case, only a fraction of global population could currently fulfil their food demand using only local crop production. Uncertainty created by the variation in crop yields, as well as the limits of local food resources, reveal that relying only on local available food creates major resilience challenges. One option to increase resilience against the variation in food production and surpass local resource limitations is international trade. The findings of this dissertation showed that increasing food trade has boosted quantity and diversity in food supply for a large proportion of the world population. This dissertation showed that despite the increasing dependency on food trade, the number of import partners more often decreased than increased, highlighting the challenges that may occur with potential large scale trade shocks. Furthermore, food and agricultural inputs can differ substantially in their respective dependencies. This further emphasises how these often-neglected hidden dependencies can reveal additional levels of complexity that needs to be considered from a resilience perspective. Resilience within the global food systems intertwines closely with the broader theme of food security. Building understanding of the vulnerabilities and resilience with regards to food production, trade and consumption is necessary for providing resilience against changing world. At the same time, it is imperative that food system narratives are not reduced to overly simplistic views that do not account for complex interactions.