The Resilient Local Food Supply Chains Alliance is a country-led, multi-stakeholders community of partners that emerged from the United Nations Food Systems Summit Process (2020-2021). It is one of the UNFSS Coalitions of Actions developed to build sustainable and resilient food systems worldwide.

The Alliance is committed to supporting partners from the public and private sectors and civil society to co-design policies and implement “game-changing” solutions for resilient local food supply chains as fundamental components of their food systems transformation priorities for sustainability and food and nutrition security.

The COVID19 pandemic, growing food insecurity, and bottlenecks in food accessibility struck a chord and reoriented countries’ focus during the Summit, especially African countries, particularly concerned about the resilience of their supply chains. In addition, the war in Ukraine exacerbated the global food and energy crises, contributing to food insecurity and the disruption of global food supply chains.

Against this backdrop, the Alliance works with countries and partners to implement their priorities, scale up solutions that will increase local production for local consumption, and support resilient local food supply chains, while addressing their food supply and food security concerns.

However, building resilient local food supply chains is more than just local production for local consumption. It involves inclusive, context-sensitive and integrated policy choices to embody good governance principles and respect local contexts specificities to support food producers, small-scale farmers, small businesses, and marginalized communities, through a variety of tools: farmers markets and other forms of territorial markets, direct to consumer farm sale (on-farm, on-line), community support agriculture (CSA), box schemes, farms shops, food coops, food hubs, local public procurement, etc.

Building resilient supply chains, enhancing production and consumption of local, diverse, and nutritious foods while supporting local communities are foundational elements of sustainable food systems.