Online
MOOC Sustainable Food Security: Food Access
Who decides what food is on your plate? Understand the basics of access to food and food decision-making from a multilevel perspective in this course. This online course is offered as a MOOC, and is part of the XSeries Sustainable Food Security.
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Why follow this course?
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.
What you will learn
- The basic principles of food access
- Understanding actors’ choices influencing food access
- Discerning dilemmas at household, local, national and international levels
- Unravelling the connections between levels and actors regarding access to food
XSeries
This course is part of the XSeries programme Food Security and Sustainability, which learns you more about how we can feed the world with its growing population and wealth in a sustainable way. The other courses in this XSeries are Sustainable Food Security: Crop Production and Sustainable Food Security: The Value of Systems Thinking.