Global Food Security and Supply

Wayne Martindale

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118699324
• eBook ISBN: 9781118699294
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Food Science
• Index: Technology & Engineering

With the global population projected to reach 9 billion by the year 2050, the need for nations to secure food supplies for their populations has never been more pressing. Finding better supply chain solutions is an essential part of achieving a secure and sustainable diet for a rapidly increasing population. We are now in a position, through methods including life cycle assessment (LCA), carbon footprinting and other tools, to accurately measure and assess our use – or misuse – of natural resources, including food. The impact of new technologies and management systems can therefore improve efficiencies and find new ways to reduce waste.

Global Food Security and Supply provides robust, succinct information for people who want to understand how the global food system works. The book demonstrates the specific tools available for understanding how food supply works, addresses the challenges facing a secure and safe global food supply, and helps readers to appreciate how these challenges might be overcome.

This book is a concise and accessible text that focuses on recent data and findings from a range of international collaborations and studies.  The author provides both a snapshot of global food supply and security today, and a projection of where these issues may lead us in the future. This book will therefore be of particular interest to food policy leaders, commercial managers in the food industry, and researchers and students seeking a better understanding of a rapidly evolving topic.

1
The Basis for Food Security

1.1 Defining What Food Security Is and How Food Supply Chains Can Deliver It

This chapter will clarify many of the complex definitions of food security so that we can relate them to the food supply chain and food system. Our analysis will present the findings from research, agricultural field trials, and industrial case studies that have shaped the current food system. As previously described, food security is often a difficult attribute to describe adequately because it is the sum of many aspects of our lives. Food security is concerned not only with the immediate supply of protein and energy, but also the sustainable supply of a healthy diet that promotes well-being. While the immediate requirement for protein and energy is critical, security will also include what we experience as accessibility, affordability, and availability of foods when we consume them as meals and our diet.¹ Indeed, an important viewpoint put forward in this book is that food security should consider all of us as consumers rather than recipients of food. While this is a descriptive point, it is important to understand that food security is not only an issue of quantity, it has become an issue that is increasingly identified by quality of life and safety attributes that are delivered to consumers.

In such a context, the food supply chain provides all the criteria necessary for food security, and this means the components of the supply chain must operate efficiently. Defining the components of supply and consumption is an important first step in understanding food supply chain efficiency. The food supply chain operations that make food security a possible goal are dependent on the production of ingredients and raw materials from agricultural operations and the development of food products by manufacturers and processors. A critical function of the food supply chain that is extremely variable and the focus of much attention because of the relationship to consumers is that of the distributor, wholesaler and retailer, who make sure that food is presented to the consumer. Thus, these agricultural, manufacturing, retailing and consumption aspects of the food supply chain can be presented as a series of four functions that are shown in Figure 1.1. The food supply chain functions will be discussed and investigated in further chapters, but the role of Figure 1.1 is to explain food supply with elements of simplicity that are the key to us developing ideas in the further chapters of this book.

Figure 1.1. The food supply chain functions and food system. There are four functions to the supply chain scenario presented here: producers; manufacturers and processors, distributors, wholesalers, and retailers; and consumers. Inputs and outputs can be measured as a balance or LCA function at each function. This is a relatively simple model, but it becomes complex when applied to populations and several supply chains.

Naturally, the simplicity presented here is fine for explanation of principles, but when this supply chain model is applied to populations, it becomes very complex due to several other attributes associated with the impacts, services, and capital of businesses and consumers that require consideration. The supply chain shown is easy to understand, but projecting it to populations and millions of consumers means it becomes potentially impossible to visualise. The sheer scale of supply functions in populations and the variance of inputs and outputs into food supply chains globally result in the need to consider the model presented in Figure 1.1 as a food system. Scientific and sociological research has provided evidence that shows how the development of food supply chains can result in the establishing of an understanding of what makes a food system sustainable.² These ideas will be developed, but an understanding of different types of inputs and outputs from the food system is central to the ideas put forward and critical in determining our perspective on food security.

An important consideration for each part of a food supply chain as a producer; manufacturer and processor; retailer, distributor, and wholesaler; and a consumer is to consider where products are being made and where they are being used. Understanding these two parts of the supply chains is critical, and it has been traditionally defined by supply and demand functions that determine what consumer trends are evident. This view of supply chains has been established for centuries and as we will see it has now developed to consider other value aspects of goods at the end of the twenty-first century. These values are associated with social and environmental impacts, as well as economic wealth creation, and they have increasingly become coupled with criticality of supply for specific resources. That is, the supply and demand functions of supply chains must increasingly be affiliated with assessment of security of supply. This is true for most manufactured goods, it always has been, but new pressures have emerged to make an understanding of the ‘push or pull’ components in supply chains. These include rapidly changing abundance of resources, geopolitical structures, price variability, price volatility, environmental impact, and health impact. Assessments of these attributes together can provide important world views on the risk of limited supply when they are blended with the consumer trends. Food supply chains provide the data concerned with material flows that enable the assessment of risk and uncertainty of ingredient and food supply. Thus, understanding where foods come from and where they are used allow us to project trends in consumption and allow us to develop strategies that deliver resilience in response to volatility and geo-political change.

Identifying the attributes of supply chains that can determine trends and criticality of supply are well characterised and have been for a significant period of time now. For example, the thought-provoking ‘Limits to Growth’ reports identified population growth, availability of natural resources, pollution, and capital investment in food supply chains as critical points in delivering sustainable global food supply.³ Whereas security assessment of supply chains is well developed for minerals and metals, it is perhaps less so for food products. The key players in providing this assessment of security are those involved in the supply chain functions, that is, the producers, manufacturers, retailers, and consumers. Understanding price variability and volatility of resources is crucial to developing trends and strategies for dealing with risk and uncertainty associated with food supply. The time scales that are used can change our perspective on sustainability because many assessments will consider data from a time series of 5 years even though we might consider projections of decades into the future most important. Price data can be used for longer periods, and we should always consider the value of using longer term time series that are greater than a 5-year historical record.⁴ It is notable to observe the recent price spikes in food globally that augmented the current food security debate, and the value of using 5-, 10-, 20-, 50-, or 100-year historical price series will provide different projections for security.⁵ Thus, a consideration of the attributes we use to develop trends is just as critical as the time series we utilise to develop food security projections.⁶ The caveat placed by this study and book is that this cannot be done without considering the food supply chain due to the supply chain being both the provider for trend data and a source of innovation that enables the delivery of food products that consumers demand.

Indeed, the need for organisations and businesses to rank the materials they utilise in terms of the risk associated with supply has become more important since the food price spikes of 2005–2008, otherwise called the ‘perfect storm’ scenario.⁷ The perfect storm was a convergence of increased demand for livestock products and a diversification of agricultural biomass into liquid biofuels. This created price volatility and uncertain supply. In a similar way, the trade of steel used for industrial infrastructure and rare earth metals used in electronic goods experienced extreme price volatility at the same time. The price hikes have focused our thinking around security with regard to our considerations of sustainability and the amount of resource reserves that are available to food supply chains.⁸ That is, how much genetic biodiversity, useful land, minerals, metals, and fossil fuels are available to produce food products. The current security debate has not only considered quantity of food, but it has begun to consider the quality attributes of food with nutrition that delivers well-being. That is, reductions in quality blended with increased production of biomass, ingredients, and food products may not provide the benefits we think because of the impact on energy consumption during manufacture and health impact after consumption.

The consideration of closed loop economies has emerged from security crises, these are systems that eradicate or reduce waste from supply chains so that everything used to produce a product remains within the supply chain or linked with other supply chains. Closed-loop thinking is different for food products because it is usually consumed and cannot be re-eaten. However, food waste within supply chains is of critical importance to future security and sustainable supply. Furthermore, nutrients manufactured into food products can be recycled within the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1: The Basis for Food Security
• 2: Understanding Food Supply Chains
• 3: The Scientific Basis for Food Security
• 4: The Sociological Basis for Food Security
• 5: Challenges and Solutions
• 6: The Future and Our Conclusion
• Supplemental Images
• Index
• End User License Agreement