ADVANCING

The Challenge of Feeding the World

Global food security has become one of the challenges of the 21st century. The increase of global food

prices has caught the attention of all governments worldwide. The vulnerability of food systems to a

number of demographic, socio-economic, environmental and policy-related factors was also among the

concerns of the globe. The detrimental impacts of high food prices and food and agriculture-related

policies affected the poor and marginalized communities, specifically in the developing countries.

The upheavals in local food systems have an influence on the regional and global food security

concerns. Conversely, the developments at the global level often have the power to penetrate deep within

the regions and states to cause high levels of insecurity. These developments may also have diverse and

far-reaching consequences for the security and over-all well-being of communities across borders.

An Evolving Concept of Food Security

 Food security is used widely across disciplines and issue areas.

 The prevalence of food insecurity is manifested by the presence of hunger and malnourishment.

 Food security is associated with the availability of food at the local, national and global levels

(McDonald, 2010).

 1974 UN World Food Conference defined food security as 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’ (FAQ, 2003: 27).

 Maxwell (1996) mentioned that in subsequent decades, three distinct paradigm shifts took place

to significantly influence the food security discourse and international agenda.

 First paradigm shift was through the late 1970’s and early 1980’s in which the academic and

policy discourse on food security witnessed a shift away from the rather limiting focus on food

availability and supply as the core concerns of food security.

priority and component of food security, shaping decisions around whether or not to go hungry in

the short term.

 The third shift indicates a move away from a purely calorie-counting approach to food security, to

one that incorporates subjective measures of what it means to be food-secure, including access

to food that is preferable (Maxwell, 1988,1996:158-60.)

 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 (FAO, 2002).

Global Food Security- Key Trends

A. Rising Food Prices and Poverty

• In the mid 2000’s, global food prices began to climb.

• The prices of key staples such as wheat, rice, maize, and soy bean as well as edible oils

all soared.

• Civil unrest in the forms of protests and riots in numerous countries around the world

happened.

• The impact of food prices spikes has been most devastating to those who are in the

poverty level.

• The global food price crisis in 2007-2008 may have forced as many as 100 million people

deeper into poverty.

• The global food price spike in 2010-2011 may have consigned an additional 44 million

around the globe to a life of poverty and food insecurity (Rastello and Pugh, 2011).

• There are several reasons that have been debated over the global food price spikes. One

of those is the on-going world population growth.

• The growth of the world population is proportionate to the demand for food and rising

incomes and growing per capita food consumption.

The rising cost of fuel and agricultural inputs like fertilizers and pesticides; in developing

countries, declining or stagnating agricultural yield growth rates in the context of the poor;

adverse weather events such as droughts and floods; the knee-jerk government export

bans in the face of food shortage, and the financial speculation in agricultural

commodities could have also been the reasons of global food prices spikes on the supply

side.

B. Population Growth and Urbanization

• By mid-century, the world’s total population is set to reach over 9 billion, doubling the

demand for food, feed, and fiber (FAO, 2009).

• The increase of demands for food comes from developing countries in Asia and Africa.

• India and China, for example, are the fastest growing countries in the Asian region.

• The demographic trends in Asia have serious implications for food systems in the region

and elsewhere.

• As the youth move from rural areas to urban areas to look for better livelihoods, there are

fewer people of working age left behind to produce the growing quantities of food required

to meet rising demand in urban areas.

• The mass movement of people from rural to urban areas has also been accompanied by

a rapid and ongoing expansion of cities and slums in parts of Asia.

• By 2030, urban populations and the number of slum dwellers in Africa and Asia are set to

double.

• Slums are characterized by lack of access to clean drinking water, inadequate sanitation

and waste disposal mechanism, making resident population highly vulnerable to

quickspreading diseases and chronic food insecurity (CISS, 2013).

• As incomes in developing countries continue to grow, more and more people are able to

access food in greater quantities.

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Initial increases in food consumption may pertain to the intake of higher quantities of key

staples- cereals.

• There is a substitution phase in which the cereals are replaced by more energy-rich foods

such as meat and those with a high concentration of vegetable oils and sugar (Godfrey et

al., 2010: 2770)

• Global consumption of meat increased by around 62 per cent between 1963 and 2005.

• The consumption of meat in the developing countries grew threefold during this period.

• Much of the growth of meat consumption took place in Asia in general and in China in

particular (Kearney, 2010:2796).

• However, not all developing countries have experienced this phenomenon of nutrition

transition equally.

• In India, for example, the consumption of meat continues to lag behind when compared to

Brazil and China for people at similar income levels.

• The overall demand for grains for direct and indirect consumption through animal

products continues to expand.

• In China, the increasing conversion of land for intensive mono-cropping of soybeans and

maize for animal feed over the decades had caused immense pollution of waterways by

pesticides and fertilizers, declines in biodiversity, the destruction of natural carbon sinks

and rising greenhouse gas emissions (Schneider, 2011).

D. Bio-fuel Production, Land Use Change and Access to Land

• The global surge in bio-fuel production was triggered in 2004-2005.

• It happened when the United States and the European Union adopted a number of

policies and incentives to boost bio-fuel consumption (USAID, 2009).

• Biofuels are seen to be significant in reducing dependence o fossil fuels in a number of

countries around the globe.

• Biofuel production –and policies that encourage and support it- has become highly

controversial in the context of global food security.

• Bio-ethanol, for example, is produced from food crops such as sugarcane, maize, wheat,

sugar beets and sweet sorghum, and is currently the most widely used form of biofuel.

• The United States and Brazil are the world’s largest bioethanol producing countries.

• Largest quantities of biodiesel, which is made from edible oils, come from Germany,

France, United States, and Italy (Naylor et at., 2007).

• Jean Ziegler (2007:2), the UN special Rapporteur on the right to food, stated that the

sudden, ill-conceived, rush to convert food into fuels is a recipe for disaster.

• The IMF highlighted that biofuels were responsible for almost half the increase in the total

consumption of key food crops in 2006-2007.

• In Asia, a large number of small farmers in countries like Cambodia, Laos, the

Philippines, Bangladesh, and Nepal continue to suffer from weak access to land and

tenure insecurity, in the wider context of weak governance institutions, poor law

enforcement, and endemic corruption.

E. Climate Change

• Climate change affects all four dimensions of food security: food availability, food

accessibility, food utilization, and food systems stability.

• Agriculture is highly-sensitive to climate, and food production is affected directly by

variations in agro-ecological conditions for growing crops (Devereux and Maxwell, 2001;

Fischer et al., 2002; Kurukulasuriya and Rosenthal, 2003; Schmidhuber and Tubiello,

2007).

• Overall studies show that the impacts of climate change will be mixed and uneven across

regions (IPCC, 2007).

• In the next four decades or so, average global temperature will rise by 2-3 degrees
Celsius

(Stern, 2006:56).
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• For countries located at lower latitudes, the IPCC warns that the productivity of major

crops like rice, wheat, and maize, is projected to drop with even small increases in local

average temperature. This is particularly the case for countries that are located in

seasonally dry and tropical regions.

• Climate change will bring the developing countries ‘high costs and few benefits’ (Stern,

2006:vii).

• Low income developing countries tend to lack adequate infrastructure for health care, and

large chunks of the population often do not have access to basic amenities such as clean

drinking water and sanitation.

• Both sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with the highest levels of hunger and

malnourishment worldwide, are set to suffer from the negative impacts of climate change

on crop production.