By Mihaela Tabacaru Remember the Stanford marshmallow experiment? It`s about preschool children having to choose between the pleasure of chewing on one sugary marshmallow now, or chewing on two marshmallows an eternity (albeit 15 minutes) later. This simple experiment… Read More »Delaying gratification (a little) to encourage sustainable agriculture
By Mihaela Tabacaru We all know it: no measure is better than its implementation. Sustainable agriculture in Africa has never been an easy task to achieve. Food security, meaning access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food for people’s needs… Read More »The half-full glass in food security: Farmers in Zambia co-create systemic change
In January 2017, the Swiss National Science Foundation organized the Progress Report Meeting of the National Research Programme 69 on Healthy Nutrition and Sustainable Food Production. During the first group discussion, I was probed for the highlights of our own… Read More »No milk without (bovine) meat
Food systems are complex because many interacting processes and stakeholders are involved. They are dynamic because their outcomes unfold over time. I’ll start with a brief definition of system dynamics as well as of food systems: System dynamics is a… Read More »The role of system dynamics in food systems research
The increased occurrence of shocks is making it more and more difficult to provide food and nutrition security for everyone at all times . This is where resilience comes into play. Resilience, roughly understood as the ability of a system to absorb disturbances and… Read More »Musings on the resilience of food systems
In February 2015, we ran two intriguing and inspiring facilitated modeling workshops with ten small-scale farmers each in Central Region, Zambia, check out a brief video. These workshops were the logical next step after our work on studying farmers’ dynamic… Read More »Building and using simulation models with farmers on the ground
In terms of dynamic decision making on the small-scale farm household level, we are particularly interested in investigating small-scale farmers’ perceptions of the food system identifying the drivers of decisions made by small-scale farmers in the food system deriving factors… Read More »Studying farmers’ dynamic decision making