Towards a National Food Sovereignty Plan: Application of a new Decision Support System for food planning and governance.

• We develop a Decision Supporting System for Food Self-Sufficiency. • We develop tools to calculate the land required for the food needs of a community and the land suitability of the crops. • We assess the Italian Food Self-Sufficiency achievable. • We outline the use of the developed method for enhancing participatory processes. • The developed method is useful for elaborating Food Sovereignty Plans. This paper develops a Decision Support System (DSS), for achieving Food Sovereignty Plans at different territorial levels. The DSS calculates the land requirement for producing the food needs of a local community, the land suitability for the involved crops, and the percentage of the food self-sufficiency achievable. The paper reports two case studies at different scales (Italy and Umbria region) for highlighting the strengths and the weaknesses of the DSS. Finally, the paper outlines the use of the developed DSS for enhancing participatory processes to achieve a National Food Sovereignty Plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]