A food systems perspective: how Global Burden of Animal Diseases links to the Global Burden of Crop Loss

Food systems comprise the interconnected webs of processes which together transform inputs (land, labour, water, nutrients, genetics, to mention just a few) into outputs including nutrition and revenue for human societies. Perfect systems do not exist and rather our global food systems operate in the presence of hazards, biotic and abiotic alike, and within the constraint of limited resources to mitigate these hazards. There are therefore inefficiencies in the system which lead to losses of: monetary, nutritional, health and environmental value as well as create additional negative externalities in the health, social, and environmental spaces. Hazards to health in our food system do not respect arbitrary distinctions between ‘crop’ and ‘livestock’ sectors, which are highly interconnected. These linkages exist where one sector provides inputs to another or through substitution effects where supply in one sector influences demand in another. The One Health approach advocates investigating the intersectoral hazards in a highly interdisciplinary manner. This paper provides a conceptual framework for how the methodologies developed by the Global Burden of Crop Loss and Global Burden of Animal Diseases initiatives may be integrated to generate burden estimates for hazards in our food systems, which better account for interconnectivity and move us towards an improved understanding of the food system aligned with the interdisciplinary nature of the One Health approach. The case study related to maize and poultry sectors linkages in the context of a wider public and environmental health are presented.