Prof Alan Renwick

All Hype and No Impact: Does taking a systems approach to our food system enable us to balance growth with environmental impact?

Aotearoa-New Zealand, like many countries the world over, faces key challenges within its food system. None more so than balancing the stated desire to grow the value of production in the face of significant environmental (and other) challenges. The multidimensional nature of the challenges faced has led to increasing calls for the need to take a systems approach to food production and consumption. This presentation considers what it means in practice to balance growth with environmental protection and the roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders within the food system. It also considers the key approaches that could help transform New Zealand’s food system so that the twin goals of higher value and a reduced environmental footprint can be achieved. An additional consideration of the paper is whether taking a systems approach provides greater insights and more importantly better understanding of how to minimise the external impacts of our food system as opposed to taking a more reductionist approach. In essence it is a question of whether the advantages of systems approaches in terms of being a holistic approach to problem-solving and consideration of long-term resilience are outweighed by the disadvantages of complexity and possible slow decision making.