Food Systems Analysis

La crisis alimentaria mundial más reciente ha puesto de manifiesto la incapacidad del derecho a la alimentación para atender y prevenir este tipo de situaciones. Ahora es el momento hacer más fuerte y eficaz este derecho, pasando de directrices de cumplimiento voluntario a leyes vinculantes. Como todos sabemos, no hace mucho tiempo, la FAO patrocinó la creación de directrices para el cumplimiento del derecho a la alimentación. Su publicación fue ampliamente celebrada, y se consideró que era el texto más detallado y completo que hubiera existido para hacer que este derecho sea una realidad para millones de personas que padecen hambre. No hay duda de que estas directrices proporcionan un marco exhaustivo para la acción y ofrecen una cobertura detallada de los temas importantes. Sin embargo, las nuevas realidades que han surgido en los últimos años, tal vez con demasiada rapidez y de forma inesperada, han puesto de manifiesto la necesidad de una regulación más completa del derecho a la alimentación que la proporcionada por las directrices. Idealmente, por tanto, su texto debería ser modificado y actualizado.

El propósito de este libro es indicar algunas áreas y temas que tendrán un gran impacto en los próximos años en relación con la aplicación del derecho a la seguridad alimentaria y a los alimentos y que actualmente disponen de escasa o nula regulación. Estos son los nuevos retos a los que va a enfrentarse el derecho a la alimentación en el siglo XXI...

Our body compulsory demands food, water and air to keep its vital functions and yet their economic nature is rather diverse
with food mostly considered a private good, water suffering an accelerated privatization process and air so far considered a
global common good. Food has evolved from a common good and local resource to a national asset and then to a
transnational commodity as the commodification process is rather completed nowadays. Cultivated food is fully privatized
and this consideration means that human beings can eat food as long as they have money to but it or means to produce it.
With the dominant no money-no food rationality, hunger still prevails in a world of abundance. In order to provide a sound
foundation for the transition towards sustainable food systems, the very nature of food as a pure private good is contested and
subsequently reversed in this paper, proposing a re-conceptualisation of food as a common good, a necessary narrative for the
redesign of the dominating agro-industrial food system that merely sees food as a tradable commodity. This aspirational
transition shall lead us to a more sustainable, fairer and farmer-centred food system. The idea of the commons is applied to
food, deconstructing food as a pure private good and reconstructing it as an impure commons that can be better produced and
distributed by a hybrid tri-centric governance system compounded by market rules, public regulations and collective actions.
Several food-related elements are already considered as common goods (i.e. fish stocks, wild fruits, cuisine recipes,
agricultural knowledge, food safety regulations and unpatented genetic resources) as well as food’s implications (hunger
eradication) and benefits (public health and good nutrition). Should food and be consider as a commons, the implications for
the governance of the global food system would be enormous, with examples ranging from placing food outside the
framework agreements dealing with pure private goods, banning financial speculation on food commodities or preparing
international binding agreements to govern the production, distribution and access of food to every human being.

"Developmentalism is still the dominant perspective in managing natural resources. Nature is strategic economic assets that sparked the exploration and exploitation of natural wealth. The
implication is massive environmental damage in many places. Political Ecology emerged as alternative perspective in managing natural resources to build synergy between nature and human
relationships through local wisdom. This paper will review briefly the prospects and challenges of political ecology as alternative paradigm in the natural resource management"

The processes underlying environmental, economic, and social unsustainability derive in part from the food system. Building sustainable food systems has become a predominating endeavor aiming to redirect our food systems and policies towards better-adjusted goals and improved societal welfare. Food systems are complex social-ecological systems involving multiple interactions between human and natural components. Policy needs to encourage public perception of humanity and nature as interdependent and interacting. The systemic nature of these interdependencies and interactions calls for systems approaches and integrated assessment tools. Identifying and modeling the intrinsic properties of the food system that will ensure its essential outcomes are maintained or enhanced over time and across generations, will help organizations and governmental institutions to track progress towards sustainability, and set policies that encourage positive transformations. This paper proposes a conceptual model that articulates crucial vulnerability and resilience factors to global environmental and socio-economic changes, postulating specific food and nutrition security issues as priority outcomes of food systems. By acknowledging the systemic nature of sustainability, this approach allows consideration of causal factor dynamics. In a stepwise approach, a logical application is schematized for three Mediterranean countries, namely Spain, France, and Italy.

This poster analyses the Food Security system of Guatemala and presents different three different scenarios of Advocacy Coalitions depending on the variables used to define the coalition boundaries. It proposes to better define what variables determine coalitions as the fuzzy approach to date does not benefit a scientifically-solid policy understanding.

Se hace un recuento de los alimentos que se desperdicia en diversos paises de America Latina y Europa, y se propone soluciones para reducir ese desperdicio. Recientes estudios de FAO indican que a nivel mundial este desperdicio llegaa un tercio del volumen total de alimentos producidos. Con ellos se podria alimentar a toda la poblacion hambrienta del planeta.

¿Qué son los alimentos para nosotros y para los demás? ¿Cómo nuestra visión de los alimentos determina el tipo de políticas alimentarias que se llevan a cabo? Estas preguntas serán las guías de las sesiones-semilla, los debates y los trabajos colectivos que forman parte de este seminario doctoral 
El sistema alimentario actual está fallando pues no cumple sus dos funciones principales: alimentar adecuadamente a toda la población del planeta y hacerlo de manera sostenible con los recursos que disponemos (tanto los finitos como los renovables) dentro de los limites planetarios.  Nuestro sistema alimentario “low cost” está basado en paradigmas productivistas, dependencia de recursos energéticos finitos (petróleo y gas), con una concentración alarmante y un desbalance de poder entre productores, consumidores e intermediarios del Norte y del Sur Global.

La raíz del fracaso del sistema (insostenible e injusto) puede estar en la valoración personal y social que tenemos de los alimentos, el valor-en-uso y el valor-de-mercado que les asignamos y lo que representan para las sociedades/clases/elites dominantes. Las diferentes consideraciones de los alimentos (como insumo esencial para el ser humano, bien comerciable, derecho humano, recurso natural, determinante cultural o bien público) determinan las políticas alimentarias dominantes (seguridad alimentaria), y las propuestas contra-hegemónicas (soberanía alimentaria) y alternativas (derecho a la alimentación y movimiento de transición alimentario).

Durante este seminario vamos a debatir sobre los valores, su traslado a políticas alimentarias y las tensiones entre diferentes modelos/enfoques para construir un sistema alimentario más justo y sostenible para el 2050.

Background and Objective: the purpose and objectives of the research is to develop a technology for processing wheat-triticale-rye grain mixture and determine the baking properties of the obtained wheat-triticale-rye flour. Material and Methods: Wheat grain line 5170, triticale grain Alexander and winter rye grain Moscovskaya 12 of 2017 were used as the objects of study. The baseline of wheat and triticale grain quality was determined by the infra-red analyzer of grain SpectraStar 2500 XL and is presented on Table 1. The quality evaluation of the obtained samples of wheat-triticale-rye flour was carried out in accordance with standards of GOST (State Standardization System) 26574-2017 "Wheat bread flour. Technical specifications", GOST 34142-2017 "Triticale flour. Technical specifications" and GOST 7045-2017 "Rye bread flour. Technical specifications ". Results and Conclusion: In this paper, for the first time, comprehensive studies were carried out to determine the milling and baking properties of wheat-triticale-rye flour samples obtained by co-processing a grinding grain mixture of wheat, triticale and rye grain at the "Melnic 100 Lux" industrial mill. To determine and compare the milling and baking properties, we processed the original wheat grain and the grinding mixtures of wheat and triticale grain in proportions 50:40:10, 50:35:15, 50:30:20. According to the results of conducted tests it can be concluded that the original grinding mixture of wheat, triticale and rye grain in proportions 50:40:10 is the most optimal. In such proportions the yield and of high-grade flour and the total yield of flour is the highest and exceeds not only all other grinding wheat-triticale-rye grain mixtures but the control sample of wheat as well. In addition, the flour obtained from that grain grinding mixture has the highest whiteness typical of the highest quality flour. According to the results of the test laboratory baking it has been established that bread from wheat-triticale-rye in proportions of 50:40:10 has the most optimal quality indicator and is most similar to the control version of wheat bread.

The social-ecological systems (SES) framework was developed to support communication across the multiple disciplines concerned with sustainable provision and/or appropriation of common-pool resources (CPRs). Transformation activities (e.g. processing, distribution, retailing) in which value is added to resource units appropriated from CPRs were assumed in developing the framework to be exogenous to the SES of focal concern. However, provision and appropriation of CPRs are nowadays often closely integrated with the market economy, so significant interdependence exists between many CPR provision/ appropriation activities and the activities in which appropriated resource units are transformed into the products ultimately marketed. This paper presents a modified version of the SES framework designed to better account for transformation activities in order to be more suitable for diagnosing those sustainability problems where it is inappropriate to define all such activities as exogenous to the SES of focal concern. The need for such modification was identified in a research project examining the challenges faced by Cambodian cattle-owning smallholders in accessing value chains for premium-priced beef. Hence the immediate focus was on strengthening the SES framework's value for facilitating a multidisciplinary diagnostic approach to food system research projects of this kind. The modified SES framework's potential in this respect was illustrated by a preliminary application that drew on literature reviewed for the Cambodian project. Significant further potential exists in using the modified framework as a foundation from which to develop a version that is suitable for application to SESs in which transformation systems are appropriately represented as endogenous. Maintaining consistency with the standard SES framework will enable communication to occur more effectively between food system researchers and CPR scholars more generally. 2 Graham R. Marshall

Social science research is related to the Bimillennium. The year 2000 is discussed in terms of turning-point events, of processes of epochalization and of large projects, exemplified in turn by environmental issues and environmental research questions. Suggestions for cooperative research and reflections on the potential significance of social research for the grand event are presented.

ISS offers a cautionary tale of what can go wrong when activists pretend to know what is best for subordinated adivasi populations. Alpa Shah demonstrates persuasively that the best antidote to misguided activism is a critical ethnographic understanding of the joys and sorrows, trials and tribulations, aims and aspirations of those poorest individuals and groups whose voices rarely get heard in academic and policy circles. Such a close-to-the-ground understanding of subaltern politics paves the way for a truly radical politics that seeks to transform the structures of power and profit that entrap adivasis in India today.