This short blog post gives an overview of some internal discussions as we finalized our paper and all the fun, interesting things that I have learned (from a public health nutrition perspective). Jess Fanzo brought this team together in March 2021 to look at common indicators across diets/nutrition, environment, and equity, which included food system employment and poverty by food system typologies (see figure on the right). I will also highlight some of the fantastic figures in the supplement of the recently published paper.
As the paper states, we wanted to examine broad patterns on how food system transition has affected indicators. In econ slang, these are called “stylized facts,” another way of highlighting macro trends. Even if they are fundamental and everybody knows, it’s good to mention them so other disciplines can interlink these macro processes to their work.
Our first significant point of persistent discussion was the food system typology patterns are a snapshot, i.e., they are not necessarily capturing transition over time, even though the patterns of food system transition have roughly followed the “developmental patterns” (endogenous). Except for some notable exceptions like the former Soviet countries, which had gone “forward and backwards” in development, as Stella Nordhagen pointed out when we presented this work at the FSEC commission.
Tajikistan, which was used as a case study, is a clear outlier in terms of % of the population who can afford a recommended diet. [See figure 1 in the paper below, and also, as Paul always reminded us in our discussions, economic affordability does not equate to consumption. The USA, for example, has 99% of the people theoretically able to afford the recommended diets, but due to physical access, neighborhood access, family food choices, and preferences, this does not equate to consumption of recommended diet]. When I talked to Quinn Marshall about the development of food system typology, he mentioned how Tajikistan is right at the cusp of the first quartile for 3 out of 4 indicators used to develop typology (see figure above), except for urbanization, where it stays in the middle with a significant proportion of the population in rural areas. Why? This is where papers on a country or regional-level food system proved very useful. This paper, by Kawabata et al., is an excellent descriptive synthesis of Tajikistan’s food system, looking across agriculture, national policies, and demographics. In Tajikistan, there’s so much (international) male migration that remittances form 37% of the country’s GDP. This, coupled with effective social safety nets, there was high enough rural income that people didn’t need to migrate to urban areas and could afford the recommended diets. Also, if you want to see the full list of potential case studies we compiled based on different indicators, email me!
We looked at so much data together during calls – which is always the best and fun part of the synthesis. We probably looked at over 500+ plots. Because the team had backgrounds in livestock, climate, economics, public health, and nutrition, it led to interesting discussions on why certain countries are outliers. For example, when we were looking at the Egypt case study and trying to understand why the overall vegetable/food prices were low, Mario talked about irrigation and watershed management initiatives, while Kate mentioned the food price subsidies. Another example is the case study on South Africa as an outlier. Ben spoke about Inequality while I talked about HIV epidemiology (i.e., dying from other causes other than diets, although HIV mortality peaked in the mid-2000s). These discussions highlight the need for multidisciplinary teams to understand and guide food system transitions for each country (and also the need to respect everyone’s discipline and insights).
Some other interesting observations from this paper:
- Inequality and food system transition – This figure shows the variability of the GINI index across all typologies, perhaps some convergence in industrial/consolidated food systems. I find GINI quite interesting (if there are suggestions for any good papers on Inequality and using GINI as an indicator of Inequality, please let me know). The plots below shows how they overlap across different food system typologies. GINI also shows considerable variability to other development indices.
2. I am team pulses here (more than eggs), and I found it interesting how domestic supply goes down with modern/industrial food systems (see Figure 2 from the paper below). I am team pulses because it shelf stables, packs protein, is great for all ages, especially for IYC, and is easy to cook. It’s also one of those versatile add-ons for cooking (like a potato). It can be added to cereals, roots, and vegetables to increase nutrient content. Check out this paper to learn more about pulses for human nutrition.
3. Other interesting plots that didn’t make the analyses/results, but I found them insightful. So here I did “distance” plots over time for supply and loss for each country, i.e., looking at the idea of deviances.
This is a simple mean of supply per capita of various foods over time by typology.
4. Other fantastic papers on regional and local food systems: I mentioned Kawabata et al. paper on Tajikistan food systems, where they use a narrative synthesis approach. Another one is on Pacific food systems that takes a more “regime” approach, i.e., a socio-ecological approach to understanding food systems (see below). I hope to see more of these contextualized food system papers with various analytical approaches in the next few years. One of the grad students, Savannah, is working on spatial analyses of the food system for an East African country, stay tuned!
5. Case studies: One of the insights pointed out during the FSEC presentation (forgot by who?) was how the policies promoting positive outcomes for each indicator had nothing to do with improving nutrition. For example, social safety nets or policies for gender equity in wages. I haven’t stopped thinking about this because I firmly believe the food system transition is a social-political transformation. Also, this paper by Bene et al. shows the correlation between food and nutrition indicators with other social, environment, and economic indices (caveat: sample size of 94 countries).
6. There was an interesting reviewer comment about the names for the typologies like ‘rural’, ‘traditional’, etc. These were the names that were developed by the original food system typology paper. There is no set linear transition for ‘traditional’ food systems to become ‘industrialized’, or that they mean primitive. I think perhaps what we want is industrial food systems more sustainable, and traditional food systems to be more affordable.
Finally, this paper was a different style of writing. More focused on summarizing broader trends from the graphs (which are super simple) and synthesizing literature. It’s not the typical scientific prescriptive writing that I am used to. It was also one of the more democratically written papers with different folks leading different sections. Nonetheless, it was such a tremendous learning opportunity for me, and I am grateful to learn from all the discussions.
