A complex system approach to address world challenges in food and agriculture - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Trends in Food Science and Technology Année : 2014

A complex system approach to address world challenges in food and agriculture

Résumé

The quality and amount of the world food supply is crucial to the well-being of every human on the planet in the basic sense that we need food to live. It also has a profound impact on world economy, international trade, and global political stability. The choice of land used for agriculture, and the livestock and plants raised on the land, will impact the sustainable use of global resources. On a global scale, there are communities where insufficient food causes nutritional deficiencies, and at the same time, there are other communities eating too much food leading to obesity. Both conditions have accompanying diseases with associated financial consequences. The above issues relate to various scales, from local to global, and to a range of scientific disciplines. Moreover, their various elements are part of an interdependent, continuously changing, and adaptive system. This implies that the response of a combination of individual elements cannot usually be inferred from the response of each individual element or subsystem. This makes the identification of an appropriate intervention to change one or more elements a complex problem. We propose that a complex system approach should be used to address the global challenges of the agriculture and food system. The complex system approach accounts for the needs of stakeholders and policymakers in the agriculture and food system, and helps to determine which research programs will enable stakeholders to better anticipate and respond to emerging developments in the world. Moreover, the approach will enable them to determine effective intervention strategies to simultaneously optimise and safeguard their interests and the interests of the environment. The approach is formulated in terms of a roadmap of procedures. It encompasses an array of methods utilised in an integrative multiscale and inter-disciplinary way.
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

hal-01195499 , version 1 (07-09-2015)

Identifiants

Citer

Harald G. J. van Mil, Allen E Foegeding, Erich J. Windhab, Nathalie Perrot, Erik van Der Linden. A complex system approach to address world challenges in food and agriculture. Trends in Food Science and Technology, 2014, 40 (1), pp.20 - 32. ⟨10.1016/j.tifs.2014.07.005⟩. ⟨hal-01195499⟩
138 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More