A comparative national-level analysis of government food system resilience activities in preparation for future food system disruptions.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic, extreme weather events, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have highlighted global food system vulnerabilities and a lack of preparedness and prospective planning for increasingly complex disruptions. This has spurred an interest in food system resilience. Despite the elevated interest in food system resilience, there is a lack of comparative analyses of national-level food system resilience efforts. An improved understanding of the food system resilience landscape can support and inform future policies, programs, and planning. Methods: We conducted a cross-country comparison of national-level food system resilience activities from Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Sweden, and the United States. We developed upon and adapted the resilience framework proposed by Harris and Spiegel to compare actions derived from thirteen national food system resilience documents. We coded the documents based on how the governments determined actions by food system resilience attribute utilized, part of the food supply chain, specific shocks or stressors, implementation level, the temporal focus of action, and the expected impact on food security. We analyzed and compared countries coded categories, subcategories, and category combinations. Results: The results showed that countries are using multi-pronged policy actions to address food system resilience issues and are focused on both retrospective reviews and prospective models of disruptive events to inform their decisions. Some work has been done towards preparing for climate change and other natural disasters, but not as much for other shocks or stressors. Conclusions: The analysis identified potential gaps, concentrations, and themes in national food systems resilience. The framework can be applied to augment existing policy, create new policy, as well as to supplement and complement other existing frameworks. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. ### Funding Statement There was no funding or grants allocated to fund this independent research. E.R.H. Moore is supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences training program. E.R.H. Moore and Roni Neff were supported by NSF Grant #1745375 (EAGER: SSDIM: Generating Synthetic Data on Interdependent Food, Energy, and Transportation Networks via Stochastic, Bi-level Optimization). ### Author Declarations I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained. Yes I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals. Yes I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance). Yes I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines, such as any relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material, if applicable. Yes The dataset used and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.