Abstract
Garrett and Rueda analyse the drivers of food systems globalisation and the ways in which increasingly global and homogeneous consumption practices are creating new couplings between places of consumption and production. The authors present recent data on food consumption trends and then describe the changes in demographics, economies, information flows, and energy policies that explain such trends. Using the lens of telecoupling, they then analyse how changes in consumption are influencing demand for land and production practices in distant regions and how these telecouplings between distal socio-ecological systems of production and consumption, as they become more visible, are giving rise to feedback mechanisms in the form of environmental and social governance.
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Notes
- 1.
To assess changes in food availability, we examine Food Balance Sheets (FBS) collected by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO 2017). FBS data rely on official information on food production, exports, and imports to produce a figure for country-level food availability. These data do not take into account re-exports of food (imported and processed in one country and then exported to others) nor changes in inventories.
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Garrett, R., Rueda, X. (2019). Telecoupling and Consumption in Agri-Food Systems. In: Friis, C., Nielsen, J.Ø. (eds) Telecoupling. Palgrave Studies in Natural Resource Management. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11105-2_6
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