Melinda Fones Sundell, an SEI senior research fellow and senior adviser to SIANI, blogs from the conference Building Resilience for Food & Nutrition Security, in Addis Ababa.
I arrived in Addis Ababa the day before the conference, along with the first swarm of desert locusts ever sighted in this city. Could this be a harbinger of things to come?
Well, the short answer to that one is “resilience”. It’s as if the already difficult job of figuring out how to produce enough food to feed the planet just got harder because we have to deal with poverty, climate change and planetary boundaries all at the same time on the production side. On the consumption side we have to ensure that food is safe, nutritious, diverse and available. …
Much of the conference is devoted to exploratory musings on the part of researchers about what resilience brings to the dialogue on food and nutrition security. There are a number of participants who seem very new to the concept of resilience and the “recovering from shocks” definition pervasive in many of the early discussions seems to focus on market and price shocks, and how the farmer recovers from these. To be fair, natural disasters and epidemics are mentioned, but climate change is not a hot topic here, at least not yet.
Read the second day’s post: Is promoting farmer resilience recycled agricultural risk reduction?
SIANI is a member-based network that supports and promotes Swedish expertise and provides an open and interactive platform for engagement and dialogue in a global context. SIANI facilitates activities across the sector with diverse membership including government, civil society, private sector and academia. SIANI provides the opportunities to come together to address a wide variety of areas within the global agricultural and development sector which include focus on food security, poverty reduction and environmental sustainability. SEI hosts the SIANI secretariat. Learn more at www.siani.se.
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