Reclaiming Food Security (Earthscan Food and Agriculture)

Some have killed millions and substantially diminished the population of a large area. The most common causes have been drought and war, but the greatest famines in history were caused by economic policy. The prevalence of under-weight, stunting, and wasting in children under 5 years of age is also very high.

Food insecurity has distressed Mexico throughout its history and continues to do so in the present. Food availability is not the issue; rather, severe deficiencies in the accessibility of food contributes to the insecurity. Between and , the total Mexican food supply was well above the sufficient to meet the requirements of the Mexican population, averaging 3, kilocalories per daily capita, higher than the minimum requirements of 1, kilocalories per daily capita. However, at least 10 percent of the population in every Mexican state suffers from inadequate food access.

In nine states, 25—35 percent live in food-insecure households. More than 10 percent of the populations of seven Mexica states fall into the category of Serious Food Insecurity. The issue of food inaccessibility is magnified by chronic child malnutrition as well as obesity in children, adolescents, and family. Mexico is vulnerable to drought which can further cripple agriculture. The United States Department of Agriculture defines food insecurity as "limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways.

Based on respondents' answers to survey questions, the household can be placed on a continuum of food security defined by the USDA. This continuum has four categories: The prevalence of food insecurity has been relatively in the United States since the economic recession The Democratic Republic of Congo is the second largest country in Africa; the country is dealing with food insecurity.

Although they have an abundance of natural resources, they lack accessibility of essential foods makes it difficult for the Congolese people in their daily lives. Malnutrition is high among children affects their ability, and children who live in a rural area are affected more than children who are live in an urban area.

A study showed the correlation of food insecurity negatively affecting at-risk HIV adults in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In grain prices increased and the people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo went to civil unrest, there were riots and protest. Hunger is frequent in this country, but sometimes it is to the extreme that many families cannot afford to eat every day.

Bushmeat trade was used to measure the trend of food security. The trend signifies the amount of consumption in urban and rural areas. Urban areas mainly consume bushmeat because they cannot afford other types of meat. The World Summit on Food Security, held in Rome in , aimed to renew a global commitment to the fight against hunger. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations FAO called the summit in response to widespread under-nutrition and growing concern about the capacity of agriculture to meet future food needs.

The Rome Declaration called for the members of the United Nations to work to halve the number of chronically undernourished people on the Earth by the year The Plan of Action set a number of targets for government and non-governmental organizations for achieving food security, at the individual, household, national, regional and global levels.

Heads of state and government attended this summit. The WHO states that there are three pillars that determine food security: Food availability relates to the supply of food through production, distribution, and exchange. Nations don't have to have the natural resources required to produce crops in order to achieve food security, as seen in the examples of Japan [47] [48] and Singapore.

Because food consumers outnumber producers in every country, [49] food must be distributed to different regions or nations. Food distribution involves the storage, processing, transport, packaging, and marketing of food. This creates the need for a bartering, exchange, or cash economy to acquire food. Food access refers to the affordability and allocation of food, as well as the preferences of individuals and households. There are two distinct types of access to food: The next pillar of food security is food utilization, which refers to the metabolism of food by individuals.

In order to achieve food security, the food ingested must be safe and must be enough to meet the physiological requirements of each individual.

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Food stability refers to the ability to obtain food over time. Food insecurity can be transitory, seasonal, or chronic. Civil conflicts can also decrease access to food. Other factors that can temporarily cause food insecurity are loss of employment or productivity, which can be caused by illness. Seasonal food insecurity can result from the regular pattern of growing seasons in food production. Chronic or permanent food insecurity is defined as the long-term, persistent lack of adequate food.

Chronic and transitory food insecurity are linked, since the reoccurrence of transitory food security can make households more vulnerable to chronic food insecurity. Famine and hunger are both rooted in food insecurity. Chronic food insecurity translates into a high degree of vulnerability to famine and hunger; ensuring food security presupposes elimination of that vulnerability.

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Many countries experience ongoing food shortages and distribution problems. These result in chronic and often widespread hunger amongst significant numbers of people.

Human populations can respond to chronic hunger and malnutrition by decreasing body size, known in medical terms as stunting or stunted growth. It leads to higher infant and child mortality, but at rates far lower than during famines. Stunting itself can be viewed as a coping mechanism, bringing body size into alignment with the calories available during adulthood in the location where the child is born. Water deficits , which are already spurring heavy grain imports in numerous smaller countries, [55] may soon do the same in larger countries, such as China or India.

Other countries affected include Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. This will eventually lead to water scarcity and cutbacks in grain harvest.

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Even with the overpumping of its aquifers , China is developing a grain deficit. Most of the 3 billion people projected to be born worldwide by mid-century will be born in countries already experiencing water shortages. After China and India, there is a second tier of smaller countries with large water deficits — Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Mexico, and Pakistan.

Four of these already import a large share of their grain. Only Pakistan remains self-sufficient.

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But with a population expanding by 4 million a year, it will likely soon turn to the world market for grain. Regionally, Sub-Saharan Africa has the largest number of water-stressed countries of any place on the globe, as of an estimated million people who live in Africa, million live in a water-stressed environment. Multimillion-dollar investments beginning in the s by the World Bank have reclaimed desert and turned the Ica Valley in Peru, one of the driest places on earth, into the largest supplier of asparagus in the world.

However, the constant irrigation has caused a rapid drop in the water table, in some places as much as eight meters per year, one of the fastest rates of aquifer depletion in the world. The wells of small farmers and local people are beginning to run dry and the water supply for the main city in the valley is under threat. As a cash crop, asparagus has provided jobs for local people, but most of the money goes to the buyers, mainly the British.

A report concluded that the industry is not sustainable and accuses investors, including the World Bank, of failing to take proper responsibility for the effect of their decisions on the water resources of poorer countries. Intensive farming often leads to a vicious cycle of exhaustion of soil fertility and decline of agricultural yields.

Extreme events, such as droughts and floods, are forecast to increase as climate change and global warming takes hold. Lessons from the IPCC SREX Report , the effects will include changing productivity and livelihood patterns, economic losses, and effects on infrastructure, markets and food security. Food security in future will be linked to our ability to adapt agricultural systems to extreme events. An example of a shifting weather pattern would be a rise in temperatures.

As temperatures rise due to climate change there is a risk of a diminished food supply due to heat damage. In other parts of the world, a big effect will be low yields of grain according to the World Food Trade Model, specifically in the low latitude regions where much of the developing world is located. From this the price of grain will rise, along with the developing nations trying to grow the grain. Due to this, every 2—2. The timing and length of the growing seasons, when farmers plant their crops, are going to be changing dramatically, per the USDA, due to unknown changes in soil temperature and moisture conditions.

Another way of thinking about food security and climate change comes from Evan Fraser, a geographer working at the University of Guelph in Ontario Canada. His approach is to explore the vulnerability of food systems to climate change and he defines vulnerability to climate change as situations that occur when relatively minor environmental problems cause major effects on food security.

Examples of this include the Irish Potato Famine [76] [ dubious — discuss ] , which was caused by a rainy year that created ideal conditions for the fungal blight to spread in potato fields, or the Ethiopian Famine in the early s. In , the hungry population could range from million to million with climate change Chen et al.

By the year , Cereal crops will decrease from 15 to 19 percent, temperatures are estimated to rise from 1 degrees Celsius to 2. In prediction farming countries will be the worst sectors hit, hot countries and drought countries will reach even higher temperatures and richer countries will be hit the least as they have more access to more resources Devereux et al.

From a food security perspective, climate change is the dominant rationale to the increase in recent years and predicted years to come. Diseases affecting livestock or crops can have devastating effects on food availability especially if there are no contingency plans in place. The genetic diversity of the crop wild relatives of wheat can be used to improve modern varieties to be more resistant to rust.

In their centers of origin wild wheat plants are screened for resistance to rust, then their genetic information is studied and finally wild plants and modern varieties are crossed through means of modern plant breeding in order to transfer the resistance genes from the wild plants to the modern varieties.

Farmland and other agricultural resources have long been used to produce non-food crops including industrial materials such as cotton , flax , and rubber; drug crops such as tobacco and opium , and biofuels such as firewood , etc. In the 21st century the production of fuel crops has increased, adding to this diversion. However technologies are also developed to commercially produce food from energy such as natural gas and electrical energy with tiny water and land foot print. Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen observed that "there is no such thing as an apolitical food problem.

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The 20th century has examples of governments, as in Collectivization in the Soviet Union or the Great Leap Forward in the People's Republic of China undermining the food security of their own nations. Governments sometimes have a narrow base of support, built upon cronyism and patronage. Fred Cuny pointed out in that under these conditions: Governments in most countries give priority to urban areas, since that is where the most influential and powerful families and enterprises are usually located.

The government often neglects subsistence farmers and rural areas in general. The more remote and underdeveloped the area the less likely the government will be to effectively meet its needs. Many agrarian policies, especially the pricing of agricultural commodities, discriminate against rural areas. Governments often keep prices of basic grains at such artificially low levels that subsistence producers cannot accumulate enough capital to make investments to improve their production. Thus, they are effectively prevented from getting out of their precarious situation. Dictators and warlords [ who?

Under such conditions food becomes a currency with which to buy support and famine becomes an effective weapon against opposition. When government monopolizes trade, farmers may find that they are free to grow cash crops for export, but under penalty of law only able to sell their crops to government buyers at prices far below the world market price. When the rule of law is absent, or private property is non-existent, farmers have little incentive to improve their productivity.

Rather than risk being noticed and possibly losing their land, farmers may be content with the perceived safety of mediocrity. If a [farmer's] property can be arbitrarily threatened by the state, that power will inevitably be employed to intimidate those with divergent political and religious opinions. The approach known as food sovereignty views the business practices of multinational corporations as a form of neocolonialism. It contends that multinational corporations have the financial resources available to buy up the agricultural resources of impoverished nations, particularly in the tropics.

They also have the political clout to convert these resources to the exclusive production of cash crops for sale to industrialized nations outside of the tropics, and in the process to squeeze the poor off of the more productive lands. Likewise, food sovereignty holds it to be true that communities should be able to define their own means of production and that food is a basic human right.

With several multinational corporations now pushing agricultural technologies on developing countries, technologies that include improved seeds, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides, crop production has become an increasingly analyzed and debated issue. Many communities calling for food sovereignty are protesting the imposition of Western technologies on to their indigenous systems and agency.

Food waste may be diverted for alternative human consumption when economic variables allow for it. The waste of consumable food is even gaining attention from large food conglomerates. For instance, due to low food prices, simply discarding irregular carrots has typically been more cost-effective than spending money on the extra labor or machinery necessary to handle them. A juice factory in the Netherlands, however, has developed a process to efficiently divert and use previously rejected carrots, and its parent company is expanding this innovation to plants in Great Britain.

In recent years, France has worked to combat food insecurity, in part by addressing food waste; since the country has passed laws prohibiting grocery stores from discarding unsold food items, requiring that they instead donate the food to designated charities. Local efforts, such as the Greater Franklin Food Council in Farmington, Maine, certainly can — and do — directly help regional food security, particularly when residents become mindful of the juxtaposition of food insecurity in their communities with their own food waste at home.

Current UN projections show a continued increase in population in the future but a steady decline in the population growth rate , with the global population expected to reach 9. Solutions for feeding the extra billions in the future are being studied and documented. People are suffering due to overpopulation , 25, people die of malnutrition and hunger related diseases everyday.

While agricultural output has increased, energy consumption to produce a crop has also increased at a greater rate, so that the ratio of crops produced to energy input has decreased over time.

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Green Revolution techniques also heavily rely on chemical fertilizers , pesticides and herbicides , many of which are petroleum products , making agriculture increasingly reliant on petroleum. The energy for the Green Revolution was provided by fossil fuels in the form of fertilizers natural gas , pesticides oil , and hydrocarbon fueled irrigation. Economy the maximum U. To achieve a sustainable economy and avert disaster, the United States must reduce its population by at least one-third, and world population will have to be reduced by two-thirds, says the study.

The authors of this study believe that the mentioned agricultural crisis will only begin to affect us after , and will not become critical until The oncoming peaking of global oil production and subsequent decline of production , along with the peak of North American natural gas production will very likely precipitate this agricultural crisis much sooner than expected. Since , human diets across the world have become more diverse in the consumption of major commodity staple crops, with a corollary decline in consumption of local or regionally important crops, and thus have become more homogeneous globally.

On April 30, , Thailand, one of the world's biggest rice exporters, announced the creation of the Organisation of Rice Exporting Countries with the potential to develop into a price-fixing cartel for rice. It is a project to organize 21 rice exporting countries to create a homonymous organisation to control the price of rice.

The organization attempts to serve the purpose of making a "contribution to ensuring food stability, not just in an individual country but also to address food shortages in the region and the world". However, it is still questionable whether this organization will serve its role as an effective rice price fixing cartel, that is similar to OPEC's mechanism for managing petroleum. Economic analysts and traders said the proposal would go nowhere because of the inability of governments to cooperate with each other and control farmers' output. Moreover, countries that are involved expressed their concern, that this could only worsen the food security.

China needs not less than million hectares of arable land for its food security. China has recently reported a surplus of 15 million hectares. On the other side of the coin, some 4 million hectares of conversion to urban use and 3 million hectares of contaminated land have been reported as well. But the rapid loss in the area of arable soils appears to be economically meaningless because EU is perceived to be dependent on internal food supply anymore. During the period — the European Union lost 0. The loss of agricultural land during the same time was the highest in the Netherlands, which lost 1.

The figures are quite alarming for Cyprus 0. A powerful, empirically grounded, thought experiment directed at enacting different human and food futures. About Help Blog Jobs Welcome to our new website. Benton Richard Fortey View All. Go to British Wildlife. Go to Conservation Land Management. Earthscan Food and Agriculture. Michael S Carolan Author. Click to have a closer look. About this book Contents Customer reviews Biography Related titles. About this book In this challenging work, the author argues that the goal of any food system should not simply be to provide the cheapest calories possible.

Lessons Learned Customer Reviews Review this book. Other titles in Earthscan Food and Agriculture. Plantation Crops, Plunder and Power. Browse other titles in Earthscan Food and Agriculture. A History of Food. Trees, Forested Landscapes and Grazing Animals. Pollination Services to Agriculture. Ploughing a New Furrow. Integrating Conservation and Production. New Zealand Pasture and Crop Science. A FHSI score is calculated for countries based on indicators of objective and subjective well-being, nutrition, ecological sustainability, food dependency, and food system market concentration.

The final FHSI ranking produces many counter-intuitive results. Why, for example, does Costa Rica top the ranking, while the United States comes in at number fifty-five? The author concludes by arguing for the need to reclaim food security by returning the concept to something akin to its original spirit, identified earlier in the book.

While starting at the level of the farm the concluding chapter focuses most of its attention beyond the farm gate, recognizing that food security is more than just about issues surrounding production. For example, space is made in this chapter to address the important question of, "What can we eat if not GDP?

Rich in detail, broad in scope, and thoroughly engaging to read. This easy to read book changes how we must think about and work on food security. The conceptual and analytic tool of the Food and Human Security Index compellingly brings social sense back into the food security debate. A powerful, empirically grounded, thought experiment directed at enacting different human and food futures.