Governance for a resilient food system

This paper's central argument is that access to food is as important as how much food is produced  and that in a world of food price volatility, climate change and other kinds of shocks and stresses, there is a great need to build resilience in the food system.

• Section one of the paper looks at developing countries, focusing, in particular, on the need to massively scale-up provision of social protection systems that target the poorest and most vulnerable people. This section of the paper also discusses the wider challenge of reducing vulnerability to food insecurity in developing countries and increasing resilience.
• Section two of the paper turns to action that needs to be taken internationally above all to tackle increase in food price volatility. The section sets out a range of actions that are needed to reduce volatility and protect poor people as well as a discussion of the role of financial speculation.
• Section three focuses on ways of easing current tightness in the global supply and demand balance for food. While policymakers are right to focus on increasing food production, a range of factors - including climate change, water scarcity, competition for land, energy security issues and falling rates of crop yield growth - suggest that this may not be easy.
• Section four explores how this agenda can be put into practice. It begins by setting out why multilateral action is important and proposes a range of essential reforms to the current multilateral system. 

 A. Evans, NYU, Oxfam - June 2011