2 – Foresight for Food Systems

Food systems foresight aims to help to provide a long-range perspective on key drivers and trends in regional and local food systems and the implications for sustainable development. Changes in the agricultural production system, such as those demonstrated by the SRFSI project in earlier stages of ACIAR SDIP, need to be understood within a wider context of long-term changes in food systems, in particular economic transformation, a changing climate, altered consumption patterns, trade and issues of nutrition.  

Foresight is a process for bringing greater social and political awareness of priority issues and for driving change through engaging key stakeholders and exploring alternative future scenarios and transformation pathways.

Bringing together key stakeholders and their different views to develop a richer understanding of the bigger picture of challenges in the region. Integration and synthesis of existing information, coupled with scenario analysis can enhance the knowledge-policy interface. Partners from different sectors have worked together in a series of foresight exercises, to develop an analytical and policy-relevant understanding of the food systems in the EGP at regional and local levels, and focused on actionable change.

The work in this component has explored how the sector is unfolding, what the key pressures are, and what it may look like in the future under business as usual and other scenarios. This can help to identify preferred transformation pathways for the future of small-scale farming.