ABSTRACT
A food system comprises all the processes involved in keeping a population fed. The TransMango conceptual framework aimed to assess the vulnerability of the food system to shocks and stresses in an integrated way by identifying outcomes to be avoided together with their root causes and dynamic pressures and pathways leading to them. A fundamental aspect of food systems is their inherent complexity due to the multiplicity of actors, feedforwards and feedbacks. Food system models help us to identify, map and analyse the interactions between the actors and their drivers, including each actor’s activity, the outcomes of this activity, and the possibilities for, and consequences of, interventions. A different approach is to define the food system as a “dendritic cluster” of value chains. There are many cases where a major aspect of the food system is local, mostly in the developing world, where food chains are shorter and less complex.
