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REPORT
July 2024
Food From Somewhere
Building food security and resilience through territorial markets
This page is automatically translated from the English original using DeepL and may contain errors.
Recent shocks – from COVID-19 supply disruptions to 2022’s record food prices – have revealed huge cracks in global industrial food chains, and shattered any remaining illusions about their ability to deliver food security in a crisis-prone world.
Persistent crises have also underscored the importance of resilient close-to-home ‘territorial’ markets that feed billions of people every day – from public markets and street vendors to cooperatives, from urban agriculture to online direct sales, from food hubs to community kitchens.
Food From Somewhere provides a comprehensive overview of these diverse food webs. It documents their critical contributions to sustaining producer livelihoods, ensuring access to healthy food for the poorest populations, sustaining cultures and communities, and keeping people fed in the face of shocks. The report urges governments to reinvest in local and regional supply infrastructure, relocalise public purchasing and food security strategies, and curb corporate capture of food systems.
Jennifer Clapp, IPES-Food expert
In this era of rising hunger and ecological fragility, global industrial food chains are catastrophically liable to break down under the strain of frequent crises. To have a chance of reaching the world’s zero hunger goal by 2030, we need to reimagine our food systems. We need to bolster the food markets that serve the poor. And we must move towards more diversity in our food systems.
Closer-to-home food markets and shorter supply chains can deliver resilience and benefit people, planet and communities. It’s about choosing ‘food from somewhere’ over food from nowhere.
Jennifer Clapp, IPES-Food expert
Million Belay, IPES-Food expert
Global industrial food chains and ultra processed foods are not feeding the world, they’re starving it. Our food systems must become more localised and more resilient. Local food webs rooted in communities and cultures – or territorial markets – are our best bet to tackle hunger and sustain the livelihoods of small-scale producers, in Africa and worldwide. They’re the sturdy roots that nourish communities and provide stability, while global supply chains sway and snap in the storm.
Million Belay, IPES-Food expert
Shalmali Guttal, IPES-Food expert
The evidence is clear – localised food systems are vital for feeding an increasingly hungry planet and preventing food insecurity and famine. They provide nutritious, affordable food, and are far more adaptable to global shocks and disruptions than industrial supply chains.
Bigger is not always better! It’s time for governments to act decisively to use public procurement to bolster sustainable small-scale producers, provide local and regional food markets with the infrastructure they need, and safeguard them from corporate dominance.
Shalmali Guttal, IPES-Food expert
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