Reclaiming Food Security

Michael S. Carolan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135067656
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this challenging work, the author argues that the goal of any food system should not simply be to provide the cheapest calories possible. A secure food system is one that affords people and nations – in both the present and future – the capabilities to prosper and lead long, happy, and healthy lives. For a variety of reasons, food security has come to be synonymous with cheap calorie security. On this measure, the last fifty years have been a remarkable success.

But the author shows that these cheap calories have also come at great cost, to the environment, individual and societal well-being, human health, and the food sovereignty of nations. The book begins by reviewing the concept of food security, particularly as it has been enacted within agrifood and international policy over the last century. After proposing a coherent definition the author then assesses empirically whether these policies have actually made us and the environment any better off. One of the many ways the author accomplishes this task is by introducing the Food and Human Security Index (FHSI) in an original attempt to better measure and quantify the affording qualities of food systems. A FHSI score is calculated for 126 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?" We need, the author contends, a thoroughly sociological rendering of food security: a position that views food security not as a thing – or an end in itself – but as a process that ought to make people and the Planet better off.

Chapter 1

Introduction

A quick Google search of the term “food security” (in quotes to ensure an accurate count) yields a staggering 19.7 million “hits”, more than “malnutrition” (17.6 million), “sustainable agriculture” (5.9 million), “green revolution” (5 million), and “food sovereignty” (0.791 million). And the term's already-high visibility looks to be only increasing. When updating these search figures, from May 2012 to July 2012, food security's hits had increased by more than one million while, for example, food sovereignty's had decreased by roughly 100,000. Not that I am surprised by any of this. My experiences with agriculture professionals, policy-makers, students (I am a professor at Colorado State University), and the general public have yielded similar results. While the term “food security” is less than forty years old—it was first used in a policy context at the 1974 World Food Congress—its diffusion through society has been rapid and thorough. Having become such a part of collective discourse, I frequently call upon the term when describing what I do, particularly when meeting someone for the first time. Not surprisingly, the moniker “sociologist interested in issues related to food, agriculture, and the environment” is often met with hollow looks. Identifying what I do with food security, conversely, triggers not only understanding but a good deal of thoughtful conversation, too.

Literally hundreds of definitions of food security are scattered throughout the literature—a review from over twenty years ago, the last of its kind to be conducted, yielded almost two hundred (Smith et al., 1992). In a policy context, however, the concept shows less mutability. Agrifood policies over the last sixty years are said to have been aimed at improving food security; at least, that is how they have been framed (Mooney and Hunt, 2009). What precisely these aims are and whether they reflect genuine food security will be addressed shortly. My point at the moment is simply that a relatively straightforward outline of the term can be discerned from the stated and implied aims of food and agricultural policy since the middle of the last century.

Let it also be clear that I use the term with a degree of hesitation. Like many scholars and practitioners (e.g. Lawrence and McMichael, 2012; Wittman et al., 2010), I am highly critical of the direction in which we have been led in its name, yet I am continually reminded during conversations with students and the general public that the term still has value. The term “food security”, as detailed later, has been hijacked by a vocal and powerful minority. I use the word “hijacked” because in the process of being translated into policy it has turned into something with little resemblance to what I would call the original spirit of food security. As detailed in Chapter 2, the conceptual roots of food security extend back to President Roosevelt's now famous 1941 State of the Union address, where he spoke of “four essential freedoms” that tie all humans together: freedom of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear. Take, for example, my students, as the subject comes up repeatedly in my classes. For them, food security means more than just food availability and access. It equally speaks to issues of sustainability, enhanced individual, societal, and nutritional well-being, and prosperity. Yet that is not the food security enacted by many current agrifood policies and practices. What my students are referencing, rather, is food security's ancestral meaning—its spirit—borne out of Roosevelt's four freedoms speech. That understanding is worth reclaiming.

What does it mean to be food secure? Is that a reference to being secure of food or secure through food? Improvements have been made over the last half century toward making the world secure of food—though, admittedly, this doesn't bring much comfort for the roughly one billion people still classified as “hungry” (FAO, 2011). Globally, we seemingly have more calories than we know what to do with, as evidenced by the fact that we now “feed” billions annually to cars (as biofuels), cattle (as feed), and landfills (as waste). According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN), the global food system produced 17 percent more calories per person at the dawn of the new millennium than it did thirty years earlier, even after factoring in a 70 percent population increase (FAO, 2002).

For decades, food security has been understood by the international community (and Western nations in particular) through the lens of the calorie. This productivist framing (Buttel, 2005) has effectively reduced the concept to a problem of production and insufficient technology utilization. The means and subsequently the ends under this framing are fairly straightforward and can be summed up in one word: more—more bushels per hectare, liters of milk per dairy cow, eggs per chicken, and the like. When assessed according to this frame, world agriculture has proven remarkably successful, as evidenced by the earlier statistic about the global food system's gains in per capita calorie production in the final quarter of the last century. Yet what are we to make of the precise type of calories being produced? In light of the so-called obesity epidemic (and rising rates of other diet-related health risks) as well as conventional agriculture's threat to environmental and public health, it is fair to ask whether these productivity “gains” have occurred at the expense of food security.

Another dominant food security frame centers on the rhetoric of free trade and trade liberalization (Mooney and Hunt, 2009). It is clear that even if we could produce all the calories needed to feed the Earth's human population—which, by the way, we already do!—without adequate food access hundreds of millions still risk going to bed hungry every night. This is in reference to a remark made by Henry Kissinger in his Keynote Address at the 1974 World Food Congress where he challenged the international community to ensure, within a decade, that “no child will go to bed hungry” (United Nations, 1975). Unfortunately, we have failed miserably at achieving this end, as hundreds of millions worldwide remain undernourished and a couple of hundred million more are malnourished (lacking the correct balance of macro- and micro-nutrients). Not that we should be surprised by any of this, as the steps we have taken over the last sixty years to enhance food security have been only tangentially related to food security's original spirit. The last thirty years, in particular, have produced unending waves of neoliberal “reforms” that have come crashing down on the world's small farmers, wiping most out in the process (Carolan, 2011b). These policies promised not only to make food widely available but to improve the purchasing power of consumers while ushering in a new era of growth, prosperity, and rising income for all. These promises have gone unfulfilled, as evidenced by the fact that hunger is the world's number-one health risk and that close to one billion still do not have enough to eat (FAO, nd).

People in abject hunger fit conventional understandings of what it means to be food insecure. They quite literally look the part. Must you, though, look and feel hungry to be food insecure? Take, for example, malnourished individuals—those whose diets are insufficient in certain essential micro-nutrients. They may not meet either of these characteristics. Malnourished individuals neither look the part—as malnourishment is a major risk factor for obesity—or feel it—as the over-consumption of highly processed foods is also correlated strongly with this state (Dumke, 2005). In the end, if a diet is clearly linked to ill health, what does it matter if under-or over-consumption is to blame? The final result in either case is the same: a shortened life and reduced well-being. Our understanding of food security ought to be updated to reflect these realities. Societies awash in cheap, highly processed, and nutritiously shallow calories ought to be rightfully categorized: as food insecure.

Food security, as currently conceived, operationalized, and measured in policy circles, leaves too much unquestioned. The FAO and World Health Organization (WHO) compile food security indicator statistics on things like the prevalence of underweight children under the age of five and the proportion of population below minimal levels of dietary energy consumption. Yet these data tell us absolutely nothing about the state of food security in high-income nations and at a minimum merely reinforce something we have long known: that incredibly impoverished countries are terribly food insecure. A UN-sponsored book titled Food Security recently remarked that “the extent of hunger and food insecurity [in the US] is much less severe than in the developing world” (Dutta and Gundersen, 2007, p. 44). In the space of less than one sentence the affluent US is extoled while the entire “developing” world is condemned on the basis of their respective levels of food security. Perhaps such pronouncements are empirically justified when food security is narrowly defined as, say, calories produced per capita. But would the statement still hold if food security started to be viewed through a “through food” lens, where human well-being became the end measured and not yields or calories per capita? I doubt it.

What, then, does it mean to think about food security through a “through food” lens? To answer this question let me ask this: what is the ultimate goal of food security—food or security? Is the endgame about promoting caloric or well-being abundance; is it about full-stomachs or full (and long) lives? For each of these questions I choose the latter option. And by the end of this book my guess is that you will, too (if you do not already).

Prior to writing this book I gave a number of public lectures about why we need to expand our conventional understanding of food security. During these events I occasionally encountered people who were uncomfortable with such an aim. Recently, for example, I had an exchange with an individual who took issue with my contention that understandings of food security cannot be divorced from well-being. Their question specifically was “What does food security have to do with measures of life-satisfaction?” I wanted to say, “Everything!”, as it seems obvious to me that food security ought to be about making people better off. Instead I made a more tempered argument, noting how, on the one hand, someone cannot be happy with life when they are starving. On the other hand, we also know that the adage about never having too much of a good thing is patently false. Returns on welfare are diminishing for even something as essential as food. Once you become sufficiently well nourished any additional food, up to a point, might still improve your well-being but not to the same degree as it would have when you were underfed. Let us also remember that there is a point at which these returns stop, after which the relationship between societal and individual welfare and food consumption turns negative. These negative returns are experienced not only in an objective health sense (poor health) but also subjectively, as a growing body of research points to how affluence and abundance can actually cause stress, regret, status consumption behavior, and, when it comes to food, obesity and other diet-related health risks (Jackson, 2009; Kasser, 2002; Medez and Popkin, 2004; Schor, 2005).

I also have a problem with how conventional food security discourse treats less affluent countries, as if there is nothing we can learn from them. There is a tendency in the food security literature to hold up as exemplars—thanks to the aforementioned “secure of food” lens—countries that may not be deserving of either praise or emulation. Again, take the US. More than a third of its adults are defined as obese (CDC, nd). Avoidable annual food waste within this country amounts to over 55 million metric tonnes (that is nearly 29 percent of annual production!), which if consumed could save from being emitted at least 113 million metric tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalents annually (Venkat, 2011). The annual total cost of pesticides alone in this nation, upon public health, the environment, and human communities, has been placed in the billions of dollars (Pimentel, 2005). And, as far as subjective well-being goes, the average citizen in the US reports far lower levels of life satisfaction than her counterpart in countries with significantly lower income levels and much higher food costs (Carolan, 2011b; Jackson, 2009). We could not emulate this model globally if we tried, as it is entirely unsustainable. But let us say, hypothetically, that we could. Given the points just mentioned, why would we want to?

The journey ahead

The book is organized around three sections. The first, consisting solely of Chapter 2, looks at the translation of food security from concept to policy directives and actual practices over roughly the last century. This move altered our understanding of the concept, taking it from something that was a means to an end (secure through food)—borne out of Roosevelt's four freedoms speech—to now an end in itself (secure of food) (see Figure 1.1). A distinct outline of food security can be discerned by looking at the stated and implied aims of agrifood policies during this timeframe, as they are often said to be in pursuit of its enhancement. As detailed in Chapter 2, this outline reflects three overlapping and cumulative foci:

1 the calorie-ization of food security (1940s to the present), where emphasis is placed on increasing agricultural output (e.g., the green revolution);

2 the neoliberalization of food security (1970s to the present), where the push is made for trade liberalization and global market integration; and

3 the empty calorie-ization of food security (1980s to the present), where for a variety of reasons—such as foreign direct investment (FDI) and the liberalization of marketing—processed foods take national food systems by storm.

Figure 1.1 Changing understandings of food security.

These framings of food security are challenged in the book's second section. Against the food security yardstick created by these framings one could draw the conclusion that agrifood policy has been a resounding success—after all, the world has never seen such abundance of cheap calories. Yet these “gains” have come at tremendous cost to the environment, individual and societal well-being, human health, and the food sovereignty of nations (see, e.g., Carolan, 2011b; Sage, 2011). Chapter 3 looks at individual and societal well-being and nutrition, specifically examining how well the above-mentioned foci have enhanced (or more accurately detracted from) these ends. The national-level indicators of nutritional and human well-being utilized in this chapter include average life-expectancy and life-satisfaction statistics, the Human Development Index and the Happy Planet Index, and dietary data (specifically, daily per capita consumption of oils, fats, and sugars) from the WHO. Chapter 4 turns to the subject of sustainability, exploring specifically the toll presently being placed on the environment under the guise of food security. Many scholars and practitioners are careful not to divorce agroecology from their understandings of what it means to be food secure (Perfecto et al., 2009). Yet the fact that countries with clearly oversized ecological food-prints (the ecological footprint of an entire food system) are simultaneously lauded for their levels of food security is as unfortunate as it is telling. From a long-term food security perspective, large ecological footprints are fundamentally unsustainable and therefore ought to be avoided. Metrics examined in this chapter include issues related to energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, water use, food waste, and the production and consumption of meat and biofuels. Finally, in Part II, Chapter 5 looks at the phenomena of food sovereignty, safety, and access while making the case for their inclusion in future conceptualizations of food security. How dependent are countries upon others for their food? How concentrated are their agrifood chains? What about food and worker safety; what impacts have agrifood policies had upon these ends? And how reliant are producers upon agribusinesses for their agricultural inputs? These questions are explored in Chapter 5.

The third and final section—comprising Chapters 6 and 7—summarizes while gleaning lessons from the previous chapters. It is in this spirit that the Food and Human Security Index (FHSI) is introduced and discussed in Chapter 6. The FHSI takes into consideration indicators for the following states/conditions:

• individual and societal well-being;

• ecological sustainability;

• potential for food independence;

• nutritional well-being; and

• freedom in agrifood chain.

FHSI scores are calculated for 126 countries. To be clear, the FHSI is not a measure of food security. To measure food security would first require that I define it in precise terms. The spirit o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I A failed project
• Part II Pieces missed
• Part III Looking forward
• References
• Index