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Concept
Food system
Summary
The term food system describes the interconnected systems and processes that influence nutrition, food, health, community development, and agriculture. A food system includes all processes and infrastructure involved in feeding a population: growing, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting, marketing, consumption, distribution, and disposal of food and food-related items. It also includes the inputs needed and outputs generated at each of these steps. Food systems fall within agri-food systems, which encompass the entire range of actors and their interlinked value-adding activities in the primary production of food and non-food agricultural products, as well as in food storage, aggregation, post-harvest handling, transportation, processing, distribution, marketing, disposal, and consumption. A food system operates within and is influenced by social, political, economic, technological and environmental contexts. It also requires human resources that provide labor, research and education. Food systems are either conventional or alternative according to their model of food lifespan from origin to plate. Food systems are dependent on a multitude of ecosystem services. For example, natural pest regulations, microorganisms providing nitrogen-fixation, and pollinators.
According to the IPCC, the global food system, including all of the various industries involved in sustainable and conventional food systems, provide employment for 1 billion people. This global food system is facing a number of challenges created by impeding global food security issues created by climate change and non-climate change stresses on the system. About 34% of total greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to the global food system. In 2020 an EU evidence review found that food system gas emissions are on course to increase by 30–40% by 2050 due to population growth and dietary change. According to FAO, it is crucial to build the resilience of agrifood systems so that they have the capacity over time, in the face of any disruption, to sustainably ensure availability of and access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food for all, and sustain the livelihoods of agrifood systems' actors.
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