Special Event 

on

Resilience Building for Sustainable Food Security and Nutrition

CSM Plenary Speech 15 October 2015

 

Introduction

 

Resilience has become a growing trend for development practitioners. However, the value and effectiveness of this approach depends on how resilience is defined, and which policies and actions it promotes.

 

The concept of resilience is not a new one. Communities have always developed mechanisms of coping, resisting, absorbing, or overcoming vulnerabilities, crises, and their manifestations.

 

The CSM identifies four essential requirements for building resilience to achieve sustainable food security and nutrition in a comprehensive manner:

 

1. Address the underlying causes of vulnerabilities in line with the human rights-based approach.

 

Building resilience must include policies and actions that not only assist communities in coping with or absorbing “vulnerabilities” and “crises,” but act to resolve, resist and prevent them and their manifestations from reoccurring. A comprehensive resilience approach must include:

 

• focus on the immediate, underlying, and structural causes of vulnerability and crises;
• rigorous context analyses, including an analysis of power dynamics, inequality, livelihoods, markets, and other factors that affect vulnerability;
• recognition that hunger and malnutrition often result from deliberate actions by parties, including the erosion local food and farming systems, expropriation or degradation of natural resources, violations of the rights of food producers, enforcement of sieges and asymmetric food trade relationships, and the use food or water as coercive tools against populations;
• pathways to realize peoples’ human rights in cases where they are being violated as well as ways to survive or cope with the manifestations of those violations; 
• adherence to “do no harm” principles by partner organizations, and avoidance of creating competing parallel systems that may heighten the risk of division and conflict;
• addressing social, economic, and political institutions that drive and sustain societal inequality and unequal burdens often carried by the marginalized. 

 

Unequal distribution of risk is particularly true in the case of climate change. Around 50% of global carbon emissions are generated by just 11% of people. But those who suffer the most from climate change have the least hand in causing it; it is estimated that by 2100, the GDP of poor countries will incur losses of 12–23%, whereas, the GDP of the richest countries may even grow due to climate change. 

 

Another example is food speculation. When wealthy investors gamble on staple food prices, the poorest populations are most heavily impacted by volatility introduced into food prices.

 

Causes vary significantly between contexts, but the following conditions are necessary for resilience building: 

 

• decentralized governance and participatory decision-making 
• appropriate accountability mechanisms for all stakeholders
• promotion of human rights and international humanitarian law compliance
• raise the awareness and capacity of local communities

 

2. Link humanitarian and long-term development programmes.

 

To achieve long-term resilience within communities we must break down the barriers between humanitarian and development institutions, funding, and programmes. 

 

Such initiatives should: 

 

• strengthen diversified local food production as well as national and local markets by supporting small farmers, particularly through access to productive resources, to make communities less vulnerable to food crises, conflicts, occupation, sieges, and other forms of crisis;
• prioritize local procurement in humanitarian responses, including the use of cash transfers and vouchers;
• establish and scale up local, national, and regional food reserves;
• support alternative methods of resource management such as water harvesting, seed banks, and urban agriculture;
• support comprehensive social protection systems;
• carry out mainstream risk analyses and crisis planning through DRR approaches, including early warning systems, disaster risk management, surge capacity, and climate change projections. The involvement of local institutions in DRR is necessary. Measuring and modeling resilience helps project the cost and relative impact of different initiatives when investing in resilience programming;

• make funding streams adaptable, flexible, long term and predictable. 

 

3.  Combine local knowledge, priorities, and initiatives with research, science, and technology.

 

Affected communities should be at the center of planning and implementing policies and actions. To support these communities, there is a need to:

 

• raise the capacities of local institutions;
• focus on mapping and supporting local initiatives;
• reduce negative strategies that increase vulnerability;
• focus on the inclusion of marginalized populations, including women, youth, small scale producers, indigenous peoples, and those living under occupation.

 

There are a number of successful local initiatives striving to increase the resilience of their populations to different obstacles: 

 

• Agricultural co-operatives are community-driven business models created as a form of resilience to both economic and environmental shocks. In San Agustı´n, Bolivia, quinoa farmers participate in farmers’ co-ops ensuring that crops are sold locally to support domestic food security in spite of the growth in foreign demand for quinoa. Farmers receive fair profits for their crops by circumventing intermediaries. 

 

• In Bangladesh, the local grassroots organization Nabolok is helping farmers build resilience to climate change with three important interlinked strategies: 

• bottom-up research and clarify how the changing climate is impacting different communities within the country;
• the application of this knowledge in programmes and initiatives to limit the impacts of climate change; 
• advocacy to enhance justice for climate-vulnerable people through knowledge dissemination and strengthening civic engagement in political processes

 

• In Palestine, thousands of acres of Palestinian agricultural lands have been razed and millions of trees uprooted by the Israeli occupation, and many farmers’ lands are vulnerable to the threat of confiscation. The Million Tree Campaign organized by the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature supports the resilience of Palestinian farmers by planting tree seedlings on damaged land or on lands threatened by expanding illegal settlements or the Separation Wall.

 

4.  Advance socio-ecological systems and sustainability. 

 

Resilience cannot be achieved without environmental sustainability and the sustainable development of communities and economies. This requires an integrative approach between social and ecological systems to ensure that they interact in a resilient, sustained manner including:

 

• regular feedback between the ecological and social systems;
• support for healthy ecosystems through the preservation and sustainable use of natural resources;
• the integration of traditional knowledge and practices into sustainability initiatives;
• the promotion of adaptive governance of communities and ecosystems.