What does a food systems perspective tell us about the food-biodiversity nexus?

By Joern Fischer

This morning, John Ingram gave an interesting presentation on food systems, food security and biodiversity. To start with, he highlighted that – perhaps surprisingly – the common definition of food security did not include anything about agriculture, nor about production. What many people thus automatically think of when thinking about food security, is not necessarily always central to it.

That said, John explained, agriculture very much sits at the intersection of food security and biodiversity conservation. It is, after all, the single most important driver of terrestrial biodiversity decline. Other human activities related to food also are to the detriment of biodiversity, including bushmeat hunting and fisheries.

An alternative approach to jumping straight to agriculture, however, was to think about food systems as a whole. Looking at that suggests that other parts of the food system (not just agriculture) also affect biodiveristy. For example, food processing and…