14 Pages, iZindaba Zokudla (IZ) is a multistakeholder engagement project that aims to create opportunities for urban agriculture in a sustainable food system in Johannesburg. IZ implements the Farmers’ Lab, a social lab used as a transitional mechanism in a larger transition to sustainability. To move the South African urban food system to an ecologically sound, economically productive, and socially equitable system, significant stakeholder integration is needed, and the iZindaba Zokudla Farmers’ Lab provides that. This reflective essay presents a history of the project (2013 until now) detailing the project’s creation of an ecosystem based on social labs that facilitate innovation in the food system. Emergent entrepreneurs and others use the social labs and their activities, as well as stakeholder engagement in their enterprise development, and these Labs have created opportunities for applied and other research in the university. This has brought innovation and change to agroecological practice in Johannesburg. This reflective essay article situates IZ within the broader evolutionary change in South Africa and considers how conversations about food lead to the creation of sustainable food systems.
25 pages, Decreasing the consumption of meat and dairy has been identified as an effective strategy for protecting the health of humans and the planet. More specifically, transitioning to diets that are lower in animal-source foods and higher in fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains offers a promising opportunity to better align consumer behaviors with contemporary nutritional and ecological goals. However, given the limited understanding of how these changes in dietary behaviors can be best promoted, there is a need to explore the merits of community-based approaches to meat reduction and their capacity to advance more sustainable practices of eating at the individual, household, and community levels. To address this gap in the literature, we surveyed more than 100 American households participating in a communitywide, 12-week-long Meatless Monday challenge and tracked the changes in their knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and food choices over a nine-month period. The case study provided herein highlights a number of key findings from our evaluation. Most notably, our results demonstrate the value of community-based efforts in initiating and maintaining dietary behavior change and provide preliminary insights into the unique roles of multilevel interventions and diverse stakeholder engagement in promoting healthier, more sustainable diets.
13 pages, The sustainability of milpa agriculture, a traditional Mayan farming system in southern Belize, is uncertain. For centuries, the milpa has been a sustainable agriculture system. The slash-and-burn aspect of milpa farming, however, has become less reliable and less sustainable over the last 50 years due to several factors, including forest loss, climate change, population growth, and other factors. The traditional milpa practices of slash-and-mulch and soil nutrient enrichment (nutrient cycling) are agroecological practices that produce food in a more sustainable way. Agriculture extension, a government service in Belize, can promote additional agroecological practices to address food and livelihood insecurities in milpa communities. This study examines perceptions of these practices from milpa farmers and agricultural extension officers in Belize using a socio-ecological systems (SES) framework. SES considers multidisciplinary linkages, including social, economic, environmental, cultural, and other factors in the agroecological system. The study finds several of these SES linkages between agroecological practices--specifically slash-andmulch and soil nutrient enrichment--and the sustainability of the milpa farming system in southern Belize. Milpa communities are part of the broader SES and therefore are affected by changes to it. Milpa communities can also be enabled and participate in solution-finding. The findings imply that increasing the use of agroecology practices in milpa communities is needed and that government involvement and action, particularly from agriculture extension services, can facilitate a more sustainable milpa farming system and therefore more food and livelihood security in milpa communities in Belize.
24 pages, National planning and health organizations agree that to achieve healthy and sustainable food systems, planners must balance goals across a spectrum of sustainability issues that include economic vitality, public health, ecological sustainability, social equity, and cultural diversity. This research is an assessment of government-adopted food system plans in the U.S. that examines which topics, across the three dimensions of sustainability (social, environmental, and economic), are included in local food system plans and conducts an exploratory analysis that asks whether the community capitals (built, cultural, social, financial, human, and natural) available in a community are associated with the content of food system plans. The research team first developed a Sustainable Food System Policy Index made up of 26 policy areas across the three dimensions that, in aggregate, define and operationalize sustainable food systems. With this index we evaluated a sample of 28 food system plans for inclusion of these policy impact areas. We then performed an exploratory regression analysis to examine whether the availability of community capitals was associated with the content of food system plans. Findings indicated that jurisdictions integrated a broad range of issues into their food system plans; however, there are certain issues across every dimension of sustainability that are much less frequently included in plans, such as strategies related to participation in decision-making, financial infrastructure, and the stewardship of natural resources. Regression analysis identified statistically significant linear relationships between particular capitals and the proportion of policy areas included in plans. In particular, higher metrics associated with poverty were associated with the inclusion of fewer policy areas and with a potentially narrower policy agenda. This study adds to the plan evaluation literature as one of the first attempts to document the content of a sample of U.S. food system plans through a sustainability lens, contributing to the knowledge of what types of issues are advanced by local food system plans and the policy implications of current gaps in planning agendas.
