Global Food Security: Lecture Notes

Global Food Security

Introduction

  • Lesson 14 focuses on global food security.
  • Connects to previous lessons on global demography, sustainable development, and migration.
  • These topics are intertwined.

Defining Global Food Security

  • Global food security refers to the availability and accessibility of sufficient, reliable, and affordable food.
  • A household is food secure when its occupants do not live in hunger or fear of starvation.

Case Study: Super Bean in Africa

  • Article from 2017 highlights the Super Bean initiative in Uganda.
  • Aimed at feeding hunger-prone parts of Africa.
  • The goal is to create a "super super bean" through genetic editing.
  • Beans bred conventionally to resist drought.
  • International Center for Tropical Agriculture operates bean gene banks in Africa.
  • Aims to encourage refugees to grow their own food for sustainability.

Evolving Concept of Food Security

  • Food security is a widely used concept across disciplines.
  • USAID Definition: Having physical and economic access to sufficient food to meet dietary needs for a productive and healthy life.
  • The presence of hunger and malnourishment indicates food insecurity.
  • Food security is associated with food availability at local, national, and global levels (McDonald).

Historical Definitions

  • 1974, UN World Food Conference: Food security is the availability at all times of adequate world food supplies of basic foodstuffs to sustain a steady expansion of food consumption and to offset fluctuations in production and prices.

Maxwell's Three Paradigm Shifts (1996)

  • Three paradigm shifts influenced the food security discourse and international agenda.

1. Shift from Food Availability and Supply

  • Late 1970s - Early 1980s: Shifted from focusing solely on food availability and supply.

2. Importance of Livelihood Security

  • Highlighted the importance of livelihood security as key to household food security.
  • Decisions based on whether to endure hunger in the short term.

3. Shift from Calorie Counting

  • Moved from purely calorie-counting approaches to incorporating objective measures of food security.
  • Includes access to preferable food and nutritional content.

Contemporary Definition of Food Security (FAO, 2002)

  • Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.

Global Food Security: Key Trends

Rising Food Prices and Poverty

  • Mid-2000s: Global food prices began to rise, leading to civil unrest.
  • 2007-2008: Global food price crisis forced 100 million people into poverty.
  • 2010-2011: Global food price spike consigned an additional 44 million to poverty and food insecurity.
  • Reasons for global food price spikes:
    • Population growth
    • Rising costs of human and agricultural inputs
    • Declining/stagnating agricultural yield growth rates
    • Adverse weather events
    • Government export bans
    • Financial speculation in agricultural commodities

Population Growth and Urbanization

  • The world population is projected to reach over 9,000,000,000 by mid-century, doubling the demand for food, feed, and fiber.
  • India and China are the fastest-growing countries with implications for food systems.
  • Urbanization leads to slums with lack of access to clean water, sanitation, and waste disposal, causing vulnerability to diseases and chronic food insecurity.
  • The shift in food supply and demand due to population growth leads to food insecurity.

Rising and Changing Incomes and Changing Diets

  • As incomes in developing countries grow, more people can access food in greater quantities.
  • Initial increases are in key staples, but there's a substitution phase where cereals are replaced by energy-rich foods like meat and vegetable oils/sugar.
  • Global meat consumption increased by approximately 62% between 1963 and 2005, mainly in Asia and China.
  • Increasing conversion of land for intensive monocropping (soybeans and maize for animal feed) causes pollution, biodiversity decline, destruction of carbon sinks, and rising greenhouse gas emissions in China.

Biofuel Production, Land Use Change, and Access to Land

  • The surge in biofuel production was triggered in 2004-2005 when the United States and the European Union adopted policies to boost consumption.
  • Biofuels are seen as reducing dependence on fossil fuels but are controversial in the context of global food security.
  • Bioethanol is produced from food crops like sugarcane, maize, wheat, sugar beets, and sweet sorghum and is the most widely used biofuel.
  • Jean Ziegler (UN special rapporteur on the right to food) stated that converting food into fuels is a recipe for disaster.
  • IMF highlighted that biofuels caused almost half the increase in the total consumption of key food crops in 2006-2007.
  • Small farmers in countries like Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Nepal suffer from weak access to land and lack tenure security.

Climate Change

  • Climate change has a major impact on all four dimensions of food security.
  • Agriculture is highly sensitive to climate, and food production is directly affected by variations in agro-ecological conditions.
  • Climate change impacts will be mixed and uneven, with average global temperature rising by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius in the next four decades.
  • Low-income developing countries lack adequate infrastructure and basic amenities.
  • Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with the highest levels of hunger and malnourishment, will suffer from the negative impacts of climate change on crop production.
  • Climate change affects food production.