Routledge Handbook of Food and Nutrition Security

Bill Pritchard, Rodomiro Ortiz, Meera Shekar, Bill Pritchard, Rodomiro Ortiz, Meera Shekar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138817197
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317596240
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nutrition, Dietics & Bariatrics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The concept of food and nutrition security has evolved and risen to the top of the international policy agenda over the last decade. Yet it is a complex and multi-faceted issue, requiring a broad and inter-disciplinary perspective for full understanding. This Handbook represents the most comprehensive compilation of our current knowledge of food and nutrition security from a global perspective. It is organized to reflect the wide scope of the contents, its four sections corresponding to the accepted current definitional frameworks prevailing in the work of multilateral agencies and mainstream scholarship.

The first section addresses the struggles and progression of ideas and debates about the subject in recent years. The other sections focus on three key themes: how food has been, is and should be made available, including by improvements in agricultural productivity; the ways in which politico-economic and social arenas have shaped access to food; and the effects of food and nutrition systems in addressing human health, known as food utilisation. Overall, the volume synthesizes a vast field of information drawn from agriculture, soil science, climatology, economics, sociology, human and physical geography, the nutrition and health sciences, environmental science and development studies.

1

FOOD AND NUTRITION SECURITY

Future priorities for research and policy

Bill Pritchard

Introduction

Food and nutrition security (FNS) is a wicked problem. There is no universal consensus on its definitional parameters, and it has complex interdependencies with other problems including human health, poverty and environmental sustainability. It is plagued by dissonance between scholarly communities, between researcher, policy and advocacy communities, and between lay and professional understandings. As Simon Maxwell observed some two decades ago: ‘From its simple beginnings, food security has become, it seems, a cornucopia of ideas’ (Maxwell 1996: 155). In light of its widely diverse framings and usage, it might be tempting to abandon any quest to bring analytical coherence to this most complex of concepts.

Yet the challenge of developing a comprehensive understanding of food and nutrition security needs pursuit. Whilst individual actors and stakeholders will inevitably proceed along specialist pathways, their separate efforts are best leveraged where there are broadly-accepted parameters that define the core dimensions of the issue. This handbook presents 33 chapters in pursuit of this goal. Readers can both glean the detail of an issue within the content of an individual chapter, and also appreciate its wider context by examining how it is positioned in relation to other chapters.

We approach this task using the ‘pillars’ framework. This approach conceives FNS in terms of four intersecting themes: availability (the maintenance of sufficient quantities of food available on a consistent basis); access (the ability for individuals in a population to have sufficient resources to obtain appropriate foods for a nutritious diet); utilization, sometimes labelled ‘absorption’ (the capacity for individuals to utilize the food that they can access to ensure good health); and stability (the robustness of food systems over time). The overarching purpose of the pillars approach is to emphasize FNS as the outcome of varied processes cutting across productive, economic, social and human health dimensions.

This approach evolved in the context of the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS), where ‘food security’ (as it was then named) was specified as follows:

Food security, at the individual, household, national, regional and global levels [is achieved] when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.¹

(FAO 1996a)

More recent iterations have embellished the definition in particular ways, as discussed below. However, the wording agreed at the 1996 Summit remains significant because it philosophically grounds the concept in three pivotal ways. First, it frames food security in people-centric terms. The definition specifies being ‘food secure’ as occurring only when people’s food needs are substantively satiated. It is not sufficient to have enough food stocks to potentially feed the population. What matters is actual achievement in meeting people’s needs. Analytically, this dislodged supply/demand factors from being the fulcrum of ‘food security’ discourse. Second, the definition is aspirational in orientation. The phrase ‘all people, at all times’ provides a specific, albeit perhaps utopian, target that connects food security to human rights, inferring that FNS is an obligation for the global community. Third, the 1996 definition makes explicit an appreciation of food security as being ‘more than calories’. Inclusion of the terms ‘nutritious’, ‘safe’, ‘food preferences’ and ‘active and heathy life’ attach the concept to social worlds and human health. This generous conception of the roles of food for human well-being has formed the basis for heightened multi-disciplinary attachments in this field, especially with social and nutrition scientists. These connections have become especially prominent during recent years as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (2000–2015) transitioned to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) (post-2015) framework. The MDG target of ‘reducing hunger by half from 1990 levels’ was monitored in line with narrowly calibrated, calorie-based conceptions of food adequacy – estimates of undernutrition defined in terms of whether national food supplies could meet estimated minimum daily energy requirements (MDER) for the population. Metrics attached to the SDGs address this problem in ways that are more consistent with wider notions of social context and human health (see later in this chapter).

The shift from narrower to more complex conceptions of FNS, formalized by the pivotal 1996 WFS definition, provides a narrative theme that runs throughout this book. Its title – The Handbook of Food and Nutrition Security – is not accidental. At its thirty-ninth session in October 2012, the UN Committee of World Food Security endorsed the terminology of ‘food and nutrition security’ as the preferred descriptor for this field (CFS 2012). Implicit within this terminology are two positions; first, that food and nutrition need to be considered conjointly – food as nutrients, contributing towards nutrition, and second, that this is an issue of security, which we understand to mean human security – the capacity to meet individuals’ hunger and nutritional needs, consistent with their own preferences and aspirations.

The remainder of this chapter explains the evolution of thinking in this field, as researchers and policy-makers have moved towards more sophisticated, albeit more complex, understandings of FNS. It first traces these ideas over time, and then uses insights from other chapters of this handbook to present an agenda of 11 themes which are critical staging posts for future research and policy in this field.

Contests of ideas about food security: from the 1940s to the 1990s

Discussion of food adequacy and hunger has been part of the human conversation since our earliest times but, for the purposes of this chapter, the contemporary narrative about food security can be usefully said to have commenced with discussions in World War II amongst the Allied Powers about the composition of the post-war world. In 1942, the Australian public servant and economist Frank L. McDougall, whilst in Washington D.C., compiled arguments made in different forums over the previous few decades into a privately circulated document, the Draft Memorandum on a United Nations Programme for Freedom from Want of Food (Philips 1981: 4). The following year, at Hot Springs, Virginia, the Conference on Food and Agriculture was convened as the very first meeting of the putative United Nations (Gibson 2012: 202). It endorsed the creation of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as a body which, according to the Preamble of its Constitution, was to work ‘toward an expanding world economy and ensuring humanity’s freedom from hunger’ (Philips 1981: 9).

From the very outset, at least on paper, the FAO’s remit was entwined with broader issues of economic and social justice. The Statement from the Hot Springs Conference stated: ‘the first cause of hunger and malnutrition is poverty’ (cited in Gibson 2012: 202). However, during the post-war years, its purpose and focus moved more squarely into questions of food availability. Through the 1950s–60s, FAO investment in its Field Programme activities expanded rapidly, and these were focused on seed improvement, field trials and, especially in Africa, locust plague management (Philips 1981: 69–77). Also in these years, the World Food Programme was established alongside the FAO, creating new arenas for cooperation in monitoring food supply and managing emergency relief activities. These supply-side foci crucially informed responses to the world food crisis of 1974, when world food prices doubled (Horton 2009). At the 1974 World Food Summit, the term food security was formally recognized and defined as:

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.

(cited in FAO 2003: 27 (italics added))

During the two decades after the 1974 Summit, successive FAO definitions of food security progressively broadened. By 1983, the centrality of food availability in the formal definition was displaced by food access, and in 1986, supplemented with the phrase ‘…for an active and healthy life’ (FAO 2003: 27). These embellishments were then concretized in the 1996 World Food Summit definition, discussed earlier in this chapter.

These shifts in terminology were not mere window dressing. They reflected substantial changes both to theoretical advances in understandings of the relationship between food supplies and hunger, and to the construction of discourses about security and development. The contributions of Amartya Sen were pivotal in both these debates.

With respect to the former, the publication of Poverty and Famines (Sen 1981) exerted an immediate and powerful effect on research and policy communities. The core idea at the heart of Sen’s work was that food insecurity is best explained by the social and political arrangements that dictate access to food, rather than the stock of available food per se. These ideas were not entirely new, but Sen effectively and succinctly ‘codif[ied] and theorize[d] the access question… [giving] it a new name, “food entitlement”’ (Maxwell 1996: 157). In Sen’s conception, entitlements are the broad attributes of the social ecosystem in which a person inhabits – their ‘totality of rights’ (Sen 1987: 64). They are fundaments of an expanded notion of justice constructed around the economics of power and property, and the cultural domains of norms and behaviour (Sen 2009).² Via the notion of entitlements, essentialist explanations which held that food insecurity derived from nature, and hence were outside of human responsibility, were socialized (Watts 1991: 15). The debate on food security was rendered as an explicitly political subject, indivisible from issues of poverty and rights.

With respect to debates on security and development, the 1974-era conception of food security understood food systems as being safeguarded, i.e., made secure, through supply management actions at national and international scales (Clay 1981: 1; cited in Maxwell 1990: 2). However, as the 1980s progressed, state-centric formulations of security were challenged by the notion of human security. This approach ‘takes its shape from the human being: the vital core that is to be protected’ (Alkire 2003: 2). The 1994 Human Development Report (UNDP 1994) seminally articulated it as resting on protection from seven threats, one of which was freedom from hunger. This recalibration of food security to the human scale represented a profoundly new way of thinking about the issue. Deriving in a general sense from cognate reformations of development ‘as freedom’ (Sen 1999), it approached the problem of food security by asking: ‘what happens when individuals experience a lack of food, and how does this deprivation shape the livelihood strategies they wish to pursue?’³ Analytically and methodologically, this approach creates an obligation to listen to the voices of food insecure people (Parasuraman et al. 2003), and incorporating their experiences and perceptions into the ways FNS is understood, reported and measured.

From the Millennium Development Goals
to the Sustainable Development Goals era

Shifts in the focus of attention from food availability to access, and from national security to human security paved the way for global target-setting, with parallel obligations for improved food and nutrition surveillance (see Marks, chapter 26). At the 1996 WFS, signatories made a commitment to work towards halving the world’s hungry within two decades, i.e., by the end of 2015. In 1996, the most current available estimates (from 1990–1992) suggested there were 839 million undernourished persons (FAO 1996b: Table 3). Subsequent revisions to this estimate now suggest that there were 1.011 billion people undernourished globally in 1990–1992 (FAO et al. 2015: 8). Based on this latest estimate, meeting the 1996 WFS target would have required the number of undernourished persons by 2015 to be reduced to approximately 505 million.

But when MDG targets were settled in 1999–2000, the aspirational metrics were altered (Pritchard and Choithani 2014). Rather than seeking to halve the absolute number of undernourished people, the MDG hunger target specified a halving of the proportion of the global population living in hunger. Pegging this target to the inflating balloon of global population gave increased scope for its attainment. The world’s population in 1990–1992 was approximately 5.365 billion. I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Food and nutrition security: future priorities for research and policy
• Part I Food availability
• Part II Economic and social access to food
• Part III Food utilization
• Index