Abstract for: Food Security as an Outcome of Food Systems: A Feedback Perspective

Hunger is an important topic still today: one out of eight people worldwide lives food insecure even after having received attention through the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals. This article looks at national food security as the outcome of food systems and tries to capture some of the system’s complexity using a feedback perspective. Following a generic socio-ecological system approach a general food system framework on country level has been developed in form of a causal loop diagram. Based on the framework three exemplary cases of general food security oriented and sustainability enhancement strategies are discussed. These cases illustrate that there are trade-offs between different goals such as food security and sustainability or between different stakeholders. The cases illustrate further that the impact of policies depends on the country’s specific context, the interlinkages within and related to the food system and the timing of implementation. This implies that there is no generally valid single solution and that a context specific understanding of the complexity of the system is needed for policy evaluation and formulation.