TERRA presents new talk TERRA Philosophers: Complexity in the Food System
TERRA Associate Laboratory has released a video of the latest “Filósofos TERRA” (TERRA Philosophers) talk on “Complexity in the Food System”, which explored the links between sustainability, resilience and the challenges facing the food system.
TERRA brought together Christophe Béné, an expert from the Alliance of Bioversity International & CIAT, Margarida Queirós, a researcher at the Centre for Geographical Studies (CEG) and coordinator of TERRA’s Thematic Line 5, and João Baptista, a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences (ULisboa), for a talk about complexity in the food system.
This multidisciplinary meeting on sustainability and food was moderated by Luís Goulão, Vice-President of the Instituto Superior de Agronomia (ISA), School of Agriculture, and researcher at Linking Landscape, Environment, Agriculture And Food (LEAF) and TERRA.
Christophe Béné began by addressing the complexity of defining the terms “resilience” and “sustainability”, in the sense that “resilience”, temporally, has a shorter duration, unlike “sustainability” which corresponds to a longer timeline. “To be sustainable in the long term, you have to be resilient in the short term,” he emphasised. The Alliance of Bioversity International & CIAT expert also shared the idea that sustainability has human attributes, a human dimension, unlike the term resilience.
In this context, Margarida Queirós stressed that true sustainability will only be achieved if there is a significant change in behaviour and in the way people relate to each other and to other beings on the planet. For the coordinator of TERRA’s Thematic Line 5, our “survival depends on others, on the other beings we relate to on the planet”.
For Christophe Béné, the constraints associated with the notion of sustainability may explain the difficulties in changing the food system to a more sustainable path. This is because such a change requires significant sacrifices, both politically and individually.
João Baptista, the researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences (ULisboa), added that placing limitations on food production and distribution is a difficult task due to the lack of mechanisms to integrate ethics into this process.
Watch the talk on “Complexity in the Food System” on the official YouTube channel of the TERRA Associate Laboratory:
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