The dominant approach to resilience tends to focus on restoring supply chains or bouncing back to pre-crisis conditions. This framing assumes the current system is worth preserving. But if the status quo is already unjust and unsustainable, what exactly are we trying to bounce back to?

This tension was central to my recent experience co-authoring the “Building Resilient Food Systems” report of the High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS). Along with a brilliant team , I worked on a drafting process that felt constrained by narrow framing. The original topic, ‘resilient food supply chains’, focused mainly on logistics, markets, and supply. While part of the broader system, this focus overlooks many key factors of food security, resilience, and wellbeing.

Fortunately, the scope was expanded from supply chains to food systems more broadly. This created space for a systems approach—one that considers not just markets, but the social, cultural, political, and ecological dimensions that shape how food is produced, accessed, and valued. However, the still-too-narrow central question remained: how do we make food systems more resilient?

Discussions on ‘building resilient food systems’ require new thinking. We need to consider how to ensure people, communities, and ecosystems are more resilient in the face of multiple crises. Additionally, how to build food systems that can support that, even in the face of shocks and stressors, is required. A broken and unjust food system does not need to be made more resilient—it needs to be transformed to support resilient societies.

Equitable and transformative
Together, the drafting committee pushed beyond these constraints to build a framework that acknowledges the limits of conventional resilience thinking. We rejected the idea of returning to a broken normal. Instead, we advocate for a future-oriented approach that centers equity and addresses deep structural and cultural barriers to resilience.

To capture this idea, we introduced a new term: Equitably Transformative Resilience (ETR). It may not roll off the tongue, and we expect to be criticised for adding yet another term (sigh). But resilience itself is a highly co-opted term and other existing terms that qualified resilience felt inadequate, or had been diluted and depoliticised. Sometimes, the language we use needs to be specific and literal, like ETR, so its meaning is difficult to co-opt. Equitably Transformative Resilience demands that we address the systemic and structural drivers of vulnerability. This relates to the capacity of people to respond to shocks, whether climate-related, economic, or political, which is profoundly shaped by structural inequalities. As importantly, it recognises the importance of food sovereignty or the power for communities to define and control their food systems, which is undermined by the dominant power structures.

Building collective power with broader movements
We live in a profoundly unjust world in a perilous state of ecological and social deterioration. Our food system doesn’t just reflect these crises; it intensifies and perpetuates them. Too often, discussions about building “resilient” food systems overlook the deeper structures, cultures, and systems that are at the root of food insecurity, poverty, and systemic inequalities that shape everyday life for the majority of the world’s population.

Many of the factors that impact food and nutrition security lie outside them, in global trade regimes, in patterns of colonialism, in patriarchal and racialised systems of governance and power. Viewing food systems in isolation risks narrowing the frame and missing the root causes of fragility and precarity. Capitalism, imperialism, racism, caste oppression, and heteropatriarchy are not peripheral issues; they are foundational forces that shape who eats, who farms, who profits, and who goes hungry. That’s why our report calls to consider food systems within a broader historical, spatial, and cross-sectoral analysis.

Without this structural analysis, any proposed solutions will be partial at best, and counterproductive at worst. This signals the need to align efforts to build resilience around food systems with broader movements for climate justice, racial justice, peace, gender equity, economic sovereignty, and reparations.

Today’s crises—climate collapse, pandemics, armed conflict, economic shocks—are not random events that are experienced evenly across society. They impact the most structurally disadvantaged people and communities and are predictable and embedded in the unjust system. Talking about food system resilience while ignoring war, genocide, authoritarianism, and corporate power is like rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship. These issues are not tangential; they are existential. We must confront them directly if we are serious about resilience.

This is not to say that focusing on food systems isn’t important. I spend much of my time and effort on policy, grassroots organising, learning, and other ways to work within and beyond the constraining structures, critical to supporting and opening up space for alternative models. But these efforts must be connected to a larger vision and movement for systemic change. We need collective power to challenge corporate dominance and resist the influence of elites who benefit from the current system.

A reservoir of wisdom

While systemic change is difficult, former HLPE reports, like the 2019 report on Agroecological and Other Innovative Approaches, have provided reference points for progressive policy-makers to make change from within, for advocates to push from the outside, and have played a role in bolstering transformative ideas in global debates.

A report is but one of many vital ways to build thick legitimacy for transformative ideas where various approaches build social, legal, economic, and political credibility for agroecology amongst a diverse range of actors. This includes, for example, social movements gathering through the Nyeleni process to articulate a vision for the future, lawyers fighting for the right to food through national and international processes, grassroots organisations advocating for the rights of migrant farm workers, and farmer organisations building agroecology schools and peasant-to-peasant learning processes to increase the viability and adoption of agroecological practices. 

The need for multiple threads to weave together a narrative to support ETR, agroecology and food sovereignty is why I’m so excited about the stories, testimonies and rallying calls for action that are reflected in Rooted Magazine – only a small reflection of the deep reservoir of wisdom, strategies, and resistance of grassroots movements for ETR around the world.

Movements and community action rooted in feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous traditions have long practiced forms of resilience that center care, reciprocity, collective wellbeing, and bring a worldview that sees humans as a part of nature, rather than having dominion over it. Lived experiences and struggles offer powerful alternatives to the extractive, exploitative systems we resist and work to transform.

In the end, resilience cannot be a euphemism for adapting to injustice. If it is to be useful at all, it must be rooted in a commitment to transforming oppressive structures and systems so that resilient, self-determined communities, rooted in justice, solidarity, and the right to a dignified life, can grow and thrive.

Author: Colin R. Anderson is co-director of the UVM Institute for Agroecology at the University of Vermont and a member of the drafting committee for the report “Building Resilient Food Systems” (2025) of the High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS).

Pull out quotes

An unjust food system does not need to be made more resilient—it needs to be transformed to support resilient societies.

We must address the systemic and structural drivers of vulnerability.

Resilience cannot be a euphemism for adapting to injustice.