Sustainable Food Security: Food Access

What does it take to provide access to safe and nutritious food every day? In this course, you’ll explore how key actors at the household, local, national and international levels negotiate and make choices on access to food.

You will learn how an individual’s food accessibility depends on social and economic dynamics at the household level. Next, you will unravel the interactions between traders, retailers, producers and buyers in markets shaping food access at the local level. At national level, you will see how politics and policies influence access to food by negotiating and aligning goals, instruments and modes of governance. You will also learn how debates and negotiations in international organisations create conditions in food trade that influence how access to food is arranged. Finally, you will combine your insights in food access at different levels for composing the big picture, and demonstrate how different levels are interrelated. Overall, the course enables you to critically reflect upon what’s on your plate and who influences that selection.

This introductory course is taught by instructors with decades of experience in university teaching and real life projects about access to food all over the world. This course will be beneficial to students, food and nutrition policy makers, development practitioners and trainers at international, national, household and individual level.

This course is part of the Programme Food Security and Sustainability, which teaches you more about how we can feed the world with its growing population and wealth in a sustainable way. The other courses in this programme are Sustainable Food Security: Crop Production and Sustainable Food Security: The Value of Systems Thinking.