Resilience, poverty and food security

The document advocates for a shift from top-down development to a resilience-based approach in African agriculture, using conceptual models like the adaptive cycle and panarchy to understand systemic collapse and restoration. Through case studies in Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and Kenya, it demonstrates how political power, colonial legacies, and rigid policy frameworks can create poverty traps, while local leadership and enabling policies can restore ecological and social resilience.

• Resilience in the context of food security is defined as the capacity of complex adaptive systems—including farmers, land, crops, and livestock—to handle unpredictability and potentially 'bounce-forward' through transformational change rather than simply recovering from disturbance.
• The 'panarchy' model explains how large-scale, slow-cycling systems, such as national ministries or global industrialization, can destroy the resilience of smaller, faster-cycling traditional village systems, often leading to poverty traps.
• In the south-east Lowveld of Zimbabwe, colonial land policies and subsequent capture of resources by the ruling elite have driven smallholder farmers into a poverty trap characterized by land degradation and a dependency on humanitarian food relief for approximately four out of every ten years.
• In Shinyanga, Tanzania, a top-down effort to eradicate the tsetse fly and clear woodland led to systemic collapse and the region being declared a desert by 1985; however, subsequent restoration of over 300,000 hectares succeeded by returning rights and responsibilities to villages.
• The Kamburu region of Kenya demonstrates that bottom-up development and local leadership can restore resilience by rejecting the 'rigidity trap' of depending on monoculture tea production for global commodity markets.
• Building resilient agricultural systems in the developing south requires a paradigm shift toward adaptive policy environments, integrated social-ecological approaches, and the acceptance of uncertainty and trial-and-error learning.

APA

Jones, M. (2013). Resilience, poverty and food security. Stockholm Environment Institute. https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-PolicyBrief-SIANI-ResilienceFoodSecurityPoverty.pdf

Chicago

Jones, Mike. Resilience, poverty and food security. Stockholm Environment Institute, 2013. https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-PolicyBrief-SIANI-ResilienceFoodSecurityPoverty.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Jones |first1=Mike |title=Resilience, poverty and food security |publisher=Stockholm Environment Institute |date=24 September 2013 |url=https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-PolicyBrief-SIANI-ResilienceFoodSecurityPoverty.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{jones2013resilience, author = {Jones, Mike}, title = {{Resilience, poverty and food security}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2013}, month = sep, url = {https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-PolicyBrief-SIANI-ResilienceFoodSecurityPoverty.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }