Whose Resilience Is It Anyway?

Who is responsible for food resilience in the UK?

It’s a question that lurked beneath every contribution to Sustainable Food Places’ recent webinar on Civil Food Resilience - attended by more than 150 people from local government, food partnerships, public health, emergency planning, academia and community organisations.

Because while food resilience is increasingly recognised as a national security issue informally, it remains strikingly absent from many emergency planning structures across the UK.  And as our “just in time” food system becomes more fragile - under pressure from climate instability, cyber attacks, biodiversity collapse and geopolitical disruption - food partnerships are already stepping in to fill the gaps.

Sustainable Food Places is clear that whilst our members may be brilliantly positioned to map the present, fragile reality of local food systems and inform and shape steps towards greater resilience – de facto reliance on food partnerships without adequate resourcing and zero statutory guidance risks an iniquitous and insufficient response across the UK.

Inequality came out loud and clear as a key theme for our members, both in terms of:

• the current post code lottery around how prepared places are to build resilience and respond to crisis; and
• the depth of food access inequality and food insecurity in the UK representing a key area of resilience risk (as well as being a profound moral stain)

In any food crisis, those with the least will suffer the most.  And the more we individualise the narrative around food preparedness and resilience, the more iniquitous and fragile our response to crisis will be.  Building a strong and equitable community food fabric is essential to preventing crisis, and reducing crisis escalation.

Tim Lang defines Civil Food Resilience as:

“the capacity of people in their daily lives to be more aware of risks to food, more skilled in reducing unnecessary risks and more prepared to act with others to ensure all society is well fed in and after crises.”

That phrase - with others - matters deeply. Food resilience cannot be individualised. As Dominic Watters powerfully reminded us during the session: “You can’t feed your child from what you can grow on a balcony.”

And the work of Sustainable Food Places is all about with others.  Our members have been pioneering cross-sector responses to food system challenges for over a decade.  Across our 120 strong network, members recognised Tim Lang’s Just in Case report as speaking directly to their bread-and-butter issues: dignified food access, local food production, robust supply chains and connected communities. For us, it became a framework for action.  In Vera Zakharov's words, 'a call to arms'

Over the past year, food partnerships across the UK have been exploring upstream solutions to civil food resilience: rebuilding local and regional infrastructure, strengthening local production and distribution, mapping community assets and identifying the policy levers needed to support this work properly - because this responsibility cannot sit solely on overstretched community organisations.

Our new Civil Food Resilience report shows this work already happening across the network. Food partnerships are increasingly acting as the “mobilising middle” of the food system: able to convene relationships, activate local responses and translate national challenges into place-based action.  Ripe examples featured include:

• Shropshire Food Partnership – responding creatively to their Local Resilience Forum’s hesitation to act on food resilience without a political mandate, by starting to link with Town and Parish councils – of which there are 220!
• Dyfed Powys – have invested in participatory research to identify eight delivery areas for a food-resilient region including mapping assets and vulnerable populations.  The work published here included funding to strengthen local food infrastructure and trial resilience solutions, with an emphasis on horticulture

One thing became very clear during the webinar and will be underpinning Sustainable Food Places future work on this theme: food resilience is not simply about emergency response. It is about enabling agro-ecological production, investing in local infrastructure, and, vitally, dignified access to food and stronger local food cultures long before crisis hits.

With thanks to all of our speakers on the day: Prof. Sarah Bridle, Daphne du Cros, Leo Leong, Chloe Masefield, Ian Smith, Dominic Watters, Vera Zakharov.

Access our report and case studies here.

Access the webinar recording here.