Cultivating a Sustainable and Resilient Food Future

A growing awareness of the costs of industrial food in the latter half of the 20th century drove a search for solutions that emerged as the sustainable agriculture movement. Over this same time period, global movements regarding food accelerated in an increasingly specialized and concentrated global industrial food system. Current national and international policy clearly favors the continued consolidation and concentration of this system, despite widely accepted evidence that these characteristics create critical sustainability challenges, as well as new evidence that this specialization and consolidation creates barriers to the resilience of the global food system. This maladaptive path is doubly destructive.