Rami Zurayk is a professor at the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences (FAFS) at the American University of Beirut (AUB), Landscape Design and Ecosystem Management Department. He is the director of the Food Security Program and Interim Coordinator of the Rural Community Development Program at FAFS. He was a member of the Steering Committee of the High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) of the Committee of World Food Security (CFS), and a commissioner on the EAT-Lancet commission on sustainable diets from sustainable food systems. He is a founding member of the Arab Food Sovereignty Network, an advisory board member of Social and Economic Action for Lebanon (SEAL) and an advisory board member for the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems and Community Development.
He has worked and written extensively on the Arab World, focusing on the political ecology of Arab food security and its linkages with the agrarian question. His latest work on the subject includes: authoring the FAO’s regional office yearly report, Regional Overview of Food and Nutrition Security in the Near East and North Africa Region 2020-21, Pandemic and Food Security (JAFSCD, 2020), Social Life, from Rural to Urban (Routledge, 2019), Crisis and Conflict in Agriculture (CABI, 2018), The Agrarian Roots of the Arab Uprisings (with Anne Gough, Cambridge, 2014); Control Food, Control People: The Struggle for Food Security in Gaza (with Anne Gough, IPS, 2013) Food, Farming and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring (Just World Books, 2011).
Mediterranean Food Systems in Conflict and Crisis
Slide 2: What are C&PC? What are their manifestations? How do they relate to food security?
Slide 3: Affected half a billion people BEFORE COVID
Slide 4: Numbers of food insecure people increased worldwide SOFI 2021. Half the world cannot reach healthy diets
Slide 5: How do C&PC affect agriculture? We don’t know enough about impacts of FS, but work is ongoing
Slide 6: Combination of C&PC with CC: negative impacts on nutrition
Slide 7: M&M: geography
Slide 8: Urbanization and agriculture
Slide 9: Urban vs rural poverty
Slide 10: a region of deep inequalities, except for access to calories
Slide 11: Map of conflicts in the region
Slide 12: Large expenses on military compared to agriculture
Slide 13: The food question
Slide 14: Consumption increases faster than production (world is opposite trend)
Slide 15: Water most limiting factor
Slide 16: PoU is increasing
Slide 17: Agri-Food systems are in transition from colonialism to global food regime
Slide 18: Among the major outcomes: loss of the Badia as a productive landscape
Slide 19: And significant changes in the production landscape: exporting virtual ware, perennializing the landscape
Slide 20: This is the situation on the eve of the COVID crisis
Slide 21: with the following outcomes from the food system(s)
Slide 22: As the crisis unfolds, efforts are mobilized by national and international stakeholders to address it using a food systems approach
Slide 23: What is a food system?
Slide 24: The food system framework
Slide 25: How do we use a food systems approach? Example from COVID crisis in M&M
Slide 26: How did the pandemic affect M&M?
Slide 27: How did the countries respond? They acted at the level of the food supply chain
Slide 28: They acted at the levels of the food environment and the individual level filters
Slide 29: What can we say about those responses?
Slide 30: Using the framework to map and evaluate responses in conflicts
Slide 31: What have the stakeholders been doing? Addressing the food supply chain
Slide 32: Addressing the FE and ILF
Slide 33: Addressing diets?
Slide 34: Addressing resilience
Slide 35: Stakeholders’ agenda
Slide 36: Reality check
Slide 37: Lessons learned
