Food systems policy and social-ecological resilience : the role of the European Green Deal for food systems transformation

Abstract

This master thesis presents a theoretical discussion of the Farm to Fork strategy’s aim to transform food systems to become resilient. Over the last 20 years, the international scientific community has established that food systems are threatened by processes of environmental change, exacerbated by modern production and consumption patterns. A growing urgency can be observed in more recent international reports, such as the IPCC special report on climate change and land (2019), the IPBES global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services (2019), or the HLPE report on sustainable agriculture and food systems (2019). The Farm to Fork strategy, published as part of the European Green Deal in May 2020, can be understood as a response to these reports. Using social-ecological resilience as the theoretical lens, this work sets out to assess the potential of the strategy to transform food systems and to make them resilient. Methodologically, systems thinking is used to conceptualize both resilience of social-ecological systems as well as models of food systems. The analysis suggests that the Farm to Fork strategy operates with a narrow and simplified approach to established food systems’ problems and focuses on optimization and efficiency; it, therefore. fails to design an actual proposal of transformation and misses an opportunity to build resilience of food systems. On the contrary, it is argued that the Farm to Fork strategy runs risk to further reduce food systems’ resilience and to increase vulnerability in the long run.