Project
Food Systems Transformation in Southern Africa for One Health (FoSTA-Health)
Across Africa, a combination of environmental and climatic changes, agricultural innovations, market regulation and external shocks to supply chains are creating new opportunities and challenges for food systems.
In this context, food system transformation is central to national and regional strategies for improving human, animal and environmental health, as well as achieving broader positive social and economic change.
FoSTA Health research is organised around four key transformation agendas that are associated with a complex combination of costs and benefits:
- Transformation within and out of maize. This includes the development and upscaling of innovative methods for improving soil health and agricultural practices in maize production systems, as well as efforts to diversify away from maize to improve climate resilience and human and animal nutrition.
- Transformation in land and water use. This includes the growth of large land acquisitions, the expansion of agricultural land, and increasing investments in irrigation infrastructure and inputs in order to improve total productivity and excess production for export markets.
- Transformation in markets. This includes transitions from production for, and engagement, in domestic and local level supply of food, towards producing high value commodities for export markets, and the associated changes in supply chains and regulations that come with this.
- And finally, transformation in diets. In particular, we are exploring the diversification of both rural and urban diets away from the overreliance on cereals, and towards an increased consumption of animal- and plant-based proteins, and processed foods.
FoSTA-Health aims to improve our understandings of how these transformations are being brought about and how they are being differently experienced across dynamic and interconnected food systems.
These food system interconnections are being simulated within a novel integrated and participatory modelling framework to explore the implications of food system changes into the future against a backdrop of changing climates.
By collaborating with a diverse range of stakeholders in exploring pathways of food system transformation into the future, the project aims to generate new insights and evidence that can inform policy and practice at multiple levels.