Sustainable Agriculture and Food
Creating resilient food systems worldwide
The potential instability of food supplies is of increasing concern even in industrial regions. For those living in less industrialised regions of the world, this situation is already common place.
The shared challenges of creating resilient food systems, include:
- How to enable the transition to more regenerative production approaches that will yield more from the same land area
- What are the approaches that will ensure access to foods of adequate nutritional value
- How to mitigate the impacts of climate change and fluctuations in the availability of fossil fuels
- How to revalue the agricultural sector for the multiple roles it plays in supporting sustainable societies including employment and livelihood creation
The Centre for Agroecology and Food Security is a joint initiative of two research and development institutes with global renown in their own right: Coventry University’s Sustainable Agricultural and Food Applied Research Group, and Garden Organic’s International Development and Commercial Research Programmes.
The Centre for Agroecology and Food Security aims to respond to the overarching challenge: How to create resilient food systems worldwide? To do this, we believe, requires a cross cutting ecological imperative, with agroecology standing as the scientific basis of sustainable agriculture. Whereas the previous industrialised approach to agriculture was based on the science of chemistry, we recognise that our farming systems are bounded by the extent of our understanding of natural organisms and systems.
The science of agroecology is the study of organisms – including humans – and their relationships as they relate to the practice of agriculture and land management. Food security itself concerns the availability, accessibility, and utilisation or adequacy of food. Taking an agroecological approach to food security implies a clear recognition of the primary role of food systems and feeding people with an adequate – even abundant – supply of nutritious food.
Themes
In order to tackle this challenge, the Centre had developed four themes which concern sustainable production techniques, stability of food supplies and communities, the means by which people obtain food, aspects of governance, ethics and human behaviour.
The four themes are: