Abstract for: National food security: towards a New Sustainable Food System (FS) in Burkina Faso

While the 2002 food crisis in Southern Africa is often used to highlight issues of chronic food insecurity, the concept of food security emerged after a long process of discussions and debates. These discussions within international institutions have focused on the definition of food security as a state of satiation of food in terms of quantity and quality. Unfortunately, they have neglected to emphasize that this state of satiation is influenced by several factors within and outside the food system (FS), which fall into three domains: environmental, social and economic. Therefore, this article attempts to analyze the interactions that may exist between the food sector and the other sectors, and to study whether a food security objective is compatible with the improvement of a large number of SDGs and sectors. We are using system dynamics, which has already proved its effectiveness in simulating the impact of public policies in several countries, and which has very powerful tools to enable us to make this diagnosis. The model built uses historical data from Burkina Faso for the period 2000 to 2020, and the flexibility of system dynamics method used allow us to simulate up to 2030 or beyond the results, with the aim of guiding policymakers in the implementation of public policies over the long term.