New Challenges to Food Security

From Climate Change to Fragile States

Ian Christoplos, Adam Pain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415822558
• eBook ISBN: 9781136777677
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Food security is high on the political agenda. Fears about societal insecurity due to food price increases and hunger, grave scenarios regarding the effects of climate change and general uncertainty about the impacts of investments in biofuels and so-call "land grabbing" on food prices and availability have meant that food security is now recognised as being a multifaceted challenge. This book is unique in that it will bring together analyses of these different factors that impact on food security.

This volume will describe a range of different perspectives on food security, with an emphasis on the various meanings that are applied to food security "crisis". The challenges to be reviewed include market volatility, climate change and state fragility. Analyses of responses to food security crises and risk will cover rural and urban contexts, arenas of national policy formation and global food regimes, and investment in land and productive technologies.

This book is unique in two respects. First, it takes a step back from the normative literature focused on specific factors of, for example, climate change, agricultural production or market volatility to look instead at the dynamic interplay between these new challenges. It helps readers to understand that food security is not one discourse, but is rather related to how these different factors generate multiple risks and opportunities. Second, through the case studies the book particularly emphasises how these factors come together at local levels as farmers, entrepreneurs, consumers, local government officials and others are making key decisions about what will be done to address food security and whose food security will be given priority. The book will explore how food production and consumption is embedded in powerful political and market forces and how these influence local actions.

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Introduction

Ian Christoplos and Adam Pain

Overview

This volume describes a range of different perspectives on food security, with an emphasis on the various meanings that are applied to ‘food security’. It presents a number of thematic issues which are investigated and developed in a set of country case studies. Particular attention is paid to the range of trends that are seen to constitute food security ‘crises’, including those facing different populations today, which have been derived from historical processes and long-term trajectories. By understanding how food security crises are conceptualized, the book also looks at different scales: global, local and household responses to crises and risk in rural and urban contexts; arenas of national policy formation and global food regimes; and investment in land and productive technologies. Primary attention is given to the dynamic interplay between old and new challenges and how these different factors generate multiple risks and opportunities. The book explores how factors impinging on food production, access and consumption are embedded in powerful political and market forces and how these influence local actions.

This introductory chapter reviews how the concept of food security is changing in relation to the new challenges and frameworks for understanding vulnerability, livelihoods and crisis in the context of multiple long wave changes in demographics, markets and climate. It also reflects on the implications of the shifting strategies and roles of national governments to safeguard food availability, stabilize prices, respond to domestic and international shocks and preserve political stability. The implications of these efforts within changing international norms related to the right to food and land acquisitions are also considered. The interests of public and private actors in relation to food production and access, and also the new security agenda are reviewed. The chapter assesses the extent to which old food security issues are being reframed. Development and food security concepts are contrasted and guiding notions such as Sen’s entitlement theory and neoclassical economic theories about market responses to scarcity are reconsidered in light of recent food crises. The chapter questions whether the language of resilience and adaptation is really new, and how these discourses may be used to disguise power relations and misguided tendencies to perceive food security as simply a managerial or technical issue. This chapter ends with an outline of the key themes that run through the book.

Why is food security back on the agenda?

Food security is high on the political agenda in many countries. There are fears about societal insecurity due to food price increases and hunger combined with grave scenarios regarding the effects of climate change. This fear is fed by general uncertainty about the impacts, on food prices and availability, of investments in biofuels and struggles to acquire rights to land and other resources. This has meant that food security is now recognized as a global and multifaceted challenge. It is also recognized that national food security and household food security for farming households are not equivalent (see India, Chapter 15) and there may even be trade-offs and difficult choices when decisions are made between, for example, enhancing national availability or helping smallholders meet their subsistence needs; between supplying growing urban populations with affordable food or addressing entrenched rural poverty; and between supporting smallholders versus encouraging investments in larger commercial enterprises. This contrasts to past and even present food insecurity interventions, which tended to focus on narrower goals and forms of intervention such as increasing the production levels of subsistence farmers through introducing new technologies, increasing national cereal self-sufficiency and food aid (see Nicaragua, Chapter 17).

The debate around food security has in part been driven by the emergence of new perspectives brought to the subject by an increasing number of researchers from a range of disciplines (politics, economics, nutrition) and practitioners from a range of sectors (agriculture, health, security, private sector development). Definitions and interpretation of the scope of the concept vary enormously. Claims are being made about different types of ‘crisis’ based on different interests, notions and beliefs on how risks of climate change, market volatility, globalization, conflict and other risks impact different aspects of food security. Indeed, the very term ‘food security’ can become a gloss that obscures the specific opportunities to meet nutritional needs in urban and rural areas, and the different roles and strategies of men and women as well as those reliant on farming versus those pursuing other livelihoods. It could be argued that three major narratives frame the meanings of food security – food as a global commodity, food as a product of farming, and environmental services and food as a basic right. This book brings together these different dimensions of food security to provide a basis for a more integrated understanding of the interplay of this range of risks. We do not claim to present a normative framework for convergence into a new food security paradigm, but we hope this volume can enhance understanding of the different entry points as a foundation for more holistic thinking, particularly in relation to the social, political and institutional aspects of food security.

A renewed concern for food security has come to prominence since the food price and financial crisis of 2008. Since then the ongoing crisis in the Horn of Africa, chronic conflicts in countries such as Afghanistan and urban crises such as the Haiti earthquake have demonstrated that food security has many dimensions. In addition, the ‘war on terror’ has added a further dimension by linking security and development as part of stabilization interventions in what have been labelled ‘fragile states’ (see Afghanistan, Chapter 14). Claims are being made regarding links between multiple crises based on scenarios about climate change and conflicts over scarce resources. In Latin America and India statements and commitments to ‘end hunger’ and protect the right to food have brought food entitlements into the political arena, at the same time as recognition is growing that remaining in farming is not necessarily an optimal solution for food security, even among the rural poor. The rising dominance of supermarkets as market players and food outlets and the changing concerns about consumption and safety (see Viet Nam, Chapter 13) have brought attention to the need for new perspectives on food security in relation to globalization, the effects of market liberalization on food markets, shifting consumption patterns, carbon footprints, new food production technologies and urbanization.

For national governments, keeping food prices low for urban populations often is (and has long been) more important than ensuring that farming is profitable or ensures subsistence in the rural hinterlands. A policy bias towards urban areas, combined with a demographic shift leading to increasing proportions of populations living in urban areas, has reinforced a preference toward ensuring price stability rather than profitable farming. Even in rural areas, shrinking farm sizes have meant that much of the food insecure population lacks sufficient land to produce a marketable surplus, and is thus more reliant for food security on price stability than on hypothetical benefits from producing for a market that is out of its reach. When governments have become nervous about sudden price spikes leading to unrest, stable national-level food availability has also taken centre stage politically. Old debates about choices between protectionism and free trade are being rekindled, with new twists, such as whether to invest in biotechnology versus organic production methods or whether to produce food or (bio)fuel. The implications of these choices for ensuring that citizens have enough to eat and can afford to pay for food, now and in the future, remain unclear. In the North and in urban areas of developing countries, there is also a growing recognition that waste and overconsumption of inappropriate foods have knock-on effects in global food systems.

Local governments are faced with helping their communities adapt to an increasing frequency of natural hazards related to climate change. Rising temperatures and environmental pressures, together with the disappearance of traditional markets for produce and labour, are bringing many local agricultural systems to the brink of ‘tipping points’, where past coping strategies are overwhelmed. These pressures are not just overwhelming farmers, but also the structures of agricultural extension, water management agencies and other institutions that are more accustomed to dealing with the ‘old normal’ than the ‘new normal’ of chronic, repeated, enduring and unpredictable crises.

Governments are not the only actors responding. One response to rising food prices and competition over resources is that private investors (sometimes in alliance with state authorities, see South Korea, Chapter 16) are seeking to gain control of agricultural land for producing food, fuel and profits through investments in large commercial farms that may either create new livelihoods and provide access to new technologies, or displace vast numbers of the rural poor (see Brüntrup, Chapter 5). In some countries that were, until recently, food insecure themselves, policy formation to encourage foreign investment to access food is driven by this historical experience.

In many parts of the world, food crises are now protracted, where threats to livelihoods and food insecurity and malnutrition have remained at unacceptably high levels for many years. This puts into question the assumptions that in the past justified responses based on short-term provision of food aid. Countries experiencing protracted food security crises are often also fragile states. Here, the challenges are how to provide long-term assistance in situations where humanitarian nutritional needs continue to exist (see Sudan, Chapter 8), and whether state-building modalities are appropriate and effective in terms of promoting societal and food security in a context of ongoing instability and political and economic upheaval.

There are increasing pressures from funders on humanitarian agencies to shift more quickly into development mode when conflicts subside, but in countries where agricultural policies emphasize market-driven models, the implications of rolling national policies out in war-torn areas are often overlooked. Assumptions that chronic conflict will merge seamlessly into development when displaced people return home raise serious questions about the extent to which these fragile areas can or should be subsumed into national policies focused on commercialization (see Uganda, Chapter 9). As agricultural services are rebuilt amid the uncertainties of post-conflict processes and as international agencies attempt to rethink their role, it is left to local level actors to deal with the ambiguities of addressing food security where food aid is no longer appropriate but where ‘modernization’ policies remain as pipe dreams.

Changing links between theory and narratives, old and new

As noted above, the new challenges to food security have led to new and contrasting definitions. A useful starting point for understanding where the different theories and narratives converge and diverge can be found in the relative emphases placed on pillars (or dimensions), agreed upon in the 2009 World Summit on Food Security (see Eide, Chapter 4) of availability, access, utilization and stability (FAO 2009)

Availability, and with that the drive for increased food production, has been perhaps the most traditional focus of food security efforts. Efforts to increase production and productivity dominated the discourse until Amartya Sen’s concept of entitlements (Sen 1982) drew attention to the question of access, and the fact that few people starve because of a lack of availability of food. Growing urbanization and rural landlessness raised doubts about who was likely to benefit from increased production and productivity. Attention to entitlements led to moves away from faith that new technological advances in agriculture would eliminate hunger. Instead, increasing emphasis was given to ensuring that the poor could access food through securing a range of income and, where required, social transfers. This was evidenced first by a shift of attention away from food to livelihood security in the 1990s, and then by an emerging legal and ethical paradigm around the right to food. At the same time there was a decline in interest and public investment in agriculture, reflecting the rise of the liberal agenda and expectations that private sector development would generate new and more secure livelihoods. More attention was given to the factors that enabled people to buy food than to just produce it.

More recently, concerns regarding access have deepened with the recognition that those facing chronic food insecurity cannot secure food access solely, if at all, through market-based solutions, not least because markets are often the greatest source of risk to poor people. Risk has many dimensions related to gender, locality, resource tenure and other factors that must be addressed if nutritional levels are to be maintained. Social protection is being increasingly called for as a way to respond to risk, based on the understanding that there is a need to move beyond assumptions that a technical or market solution can be found for the poorest sectors of the population for either producing or buying food. There is also growing emphasis on nutrition security. The centrality of access to and utilization of food stuffs is epitomized by the ‘South Asian enigma’ of improved aggregate supply of foods and rapid economic growth, (see India, Chapter 15) combined with relatively poor progress in nutritional outcomes with both life course and intergenerational impacts. However, regardless of whether the solution has been envisaged as markets, social protection or nutrition, weak institutions and public service capacities have stood in the way of turning these approaches into changes on the ground (see Sierra Leone, Chapter 11).

Interventions for livelihood support are also being recast as ways to address concerns for youth employment and issues of inequality. This is partly in relation to the demographic factors behind the unrest such as that which contributed to the Arab Spring, and partly because of trends where the young in many countries are increasingly eager to leave agriculture.

Even those aspects of food security that remain associated with smallholder farming are being perceived differently, as is the assumption that reinforcing small-holder production should be the cornerstone of rural food security efforts. There is a growing recognition that smallholder farms are becoming too small to meet subsistence, but that smallholders are continuing to farm. This phenomenon has meant that the past assumptions of the poor being driven out of agriculture, leading to increasing farm sizes, have been disproven. Smallholders have hung on in agriculture but are becoming increasingly reliant on a range of other sources of income. Optimistic scenarios about these livelihood diversification efforts constituting a ‘solution’ for the rural poor are beginning to give way to recognition that these are more appropriately seen as deteriorating ‘coping’ efforts that are unlikely to meet nutritional needs in the long-term. This has implications for gender roles in ensuring food security, farming and livelihoods, as access to different forms of employment, markets, and responsibilities for generating cash and feeding the family is often regulated by gender (see Nepal, Chapter 12).

Though food access concerns are still strong, over the past decade there has been a shift back to recognizing that ensuring availability is, or will soon be, a serious problem at least at a regional level if not at a global level (see Willenbockel, Chapter 3). Narratives increasingly depict food security crises as being related to Malthusian scenarios regarding the effects of climate change, combined with demographic growth and scarcity of land and water. These narratives may have questionable empirical foundations, but they are powerful political messages that seem to be driving decision making about the assumed advantages of ‘modern and efficient’ mega-farms versus ‘traditional and risk averse’ smallholders. Fears have also grown regarding the shift in agriculture from food to fuel production and the search for ways to combine reductions in carbon emissions with increased production for a growing global population.

Acknowledgements that food security efforts in many countries have not led to sufficient or sustained reduction in hunger and malnutrition have resulted in a renewed attention to utilization and the consumption end of the equation. This may also be related to the new ‘results agenda’, as aid donors are asking for proof of whether or not they have received ‘value for money’ by measuring a given intervention’s impact on saved lives and reduced hunger. The renewed attention to consumption and malnutrition is also because of the epidemic of obesity ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Food Security and Food Crises Evolving realities, evolving debates
• Part I New trends and challenges
• Part II Case studies
• Part III Conclusions
• Index