Food Insecurity

11 Key excerpts on "Food Insecurity"

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  eBook - ePub

  Food Security in the Developing World

  • John Michael Ashley(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Three

  Causes of Food Insecurity

  Abstract

  The multidimensional etiology of Food Insecurity is explored. The most important causes discussed are poverty and insufficient awareness; environmental degradation and climate change; food price hikes and price instability; conflict; sub-optimal enabling environment for food security; pre-dispositions of the community to disease and intestinal afflictions; large-scale land lease in one country by another; and, large areas of arable land set aside for biofuel production

  Keywords

  Poverty; awareness; climate; FPC; conflict; policies; disease; land; biofuel; population; productivity; social

  3.1 Multidimensional Etiology

  Section 2.5 has scoped the predisposition of some communities and individuals toward food and nutrition insecurity, this discussion touching on “causes” of the conditions. More detail is given below on the technical and social causes underlying these correlations, the causes often interrelated.

  The world faces a new conjunction of several factors with a cumulative effect bearing little relation to the causes of the major food crises at the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s, particularly in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa (EC, 2009 ) op. cit . The new factors include declining world food stocks, population explosion in many developing countries especially in urban areas, food and fuel price fluctuations, expansion of biofuel production from erstwhile “food crops”, and climate change.

  3.2 Poverty and Insufficient Awareness

  The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) defines poverty as a state which “encompasses different aspects of deprivation that relate to human capabilities including consumption and food security, health, education, rights, voice, security, dignity and decent work”. Poverty is not merely “income poverty” or “consumption poverty”, but poverty of equitable opportunity. In the view of the Organization of American States, poverty for such peoples implies and includes undernutrition, unemployment, illiteracy (especially among women), environmental risks and limited access to social and sanitation services, including health services in general (OEA, 2000

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  Ensuring Global Food Safety

  Exploring Global Harmonization

  • Oliva DSouza(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Delve Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Therefore, Food Insecurity is more prevalent in that group of people who are economically backward and are below the poverty line. There are a number of people who are facing acute shortage of food are generally living in rural areas and have limited financial resources. In the urban areas, there are a number of people who are facing a number of issues Ensuring Global Food Safety: Exploring Global Harmonization 10 related to food security because of limited employment rates and the presence of low wage rates. However, the statistics show that they are limited cases of food deficiency and malnutrition in the urban areas, whereas, the number of problems related to food security may increase in the future because of increase in urbanization. A number of households have accessibility to food that is required but they do not have enough food to make sure that everyone in the family gets an adequate diet. Similarly, there is enough food in a number of places of the globe to provide people with food to meet their requirements, but they do not have enough food to maintain a healthy nutritional status for everyone in the family. The availability of food and accessibility to food are two different things and the accessibility to the food at the household level depends on a number of factors such as age, sex, number of family members and the status of the health of the family members in the family. There a is number of females, infants, and children who are born as low weight babies are known to have less access to food and they are known to receive less amount of food. 1.3.1 Demographic Trends The increase in the number of people every year and the population explosion is known to be a huge threat to food security. The rate at which the population is growing is known to create a lot of risks to ensure food security to the people across the world.

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  Climate Change and Challenges in Rural Livelihoods

  • Stephanya Lynn JonasLabee(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Delve Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Food Insecurity also exists in a combination of the three factors in some regions (Burke and Lobell, 2010). To understand the wider impacts of climate change on the food security, there is a need to get an insight on the mentioned factors that determine the nature of Food Insecurity. The aspects of food security such as access, availability, utilization, and security need to be understood in depth and their relationships with climate change established. One of the most abrupt shortcomings of the today humanity is the inability to guarantee food security to the food insecure population. Close to one billion people are living in chronic hunger now (Burke and Lobell, 2010). The recent economic growth and increased agricultural productivity in some regions of the world brought the issue of Food Insecurity to a wider swath of the developing world. However, some regions that have not witnessed the increased productivity and economic growth and in this manner, they still languish in extreme hunger and most cases, they tend to be worse off regarding food security than they were in the past. There is little progress achieved in trying to understand how some countries made that effort to come out of the Food Insecurity bondage while their counterparts are still being faced with many problems after many years of attempt to restore their agricultural sector. For centuries now, this kind of phenomenon has been subjected to a lot of debate making it a central area of research in the field of economics. Effecting the transition from a condition of extreme poverty to that of wealth is a major issue with little consensus. The reason why arriving at a consensus is difficult despite myriad research done in this area is because food security including other variable used in measuring the human well-being has complex and multiple Climate Change and Food Security 115 determents that have variations on exactly which causes are important and which one is less crucial.

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  The Feeding of Nations

  Redefining Food Security for the 21st Century

  • Mark Gibson(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  This is where it gets tricky. Apart from the main protagonists of poverty, political will, con-flict and disasters, there are so many other factors involved that collude to further exacerbate the problem or maintain the status quo. Moreover, not enough is currently known about how all these variables com-bine or interact to promote Food Insecurity. Some like climate change might have obvious implications on the pattern of food production, or so we might think but what of the other variables and how do they manifest exactly? How does the philosophy of economic development affect poverty alleviation and do we fully understand it? What of migration or urbanisation? How about natural resources or biofuels and what else might we be missing? These questions and more need to be considered and addressed if any real progress is to be made in allowing people to determine their own futures in respect of the security of food. Food security then is about understanding food in security; by reverse engineering the social construct, students of the phenomenon aim to break down the problem into its component parts and to figure out how to put them back, only better. An unforgivable oversimplification perhaps but sufficiently descrip-tive. It is important to note too that when literature talks of food security, it is invariably directed at the developing nations yet Food Insecurity is not just a problem of the poorer countries. Many developed economies suffer the same inequalities of nutritional distribution and poor diets as their poorer counter-parts, although usually to a much lesser extent. Nevertheless, this in turn creates enormous public health problems that need to be addressed by both developing and developed countries alike. Thus, the notion 6 The Feeding of Nations: Redefining Food Security for the 21st Century of adequate food for all today is a global phenomena impinging on many aspects of every human being’s daily life.

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  Food Security and Development

  Country Case Studies

  • Udaya Sekhar Nagothu(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  One might argue that the global obesity epidemic is another case of Food Insecurity – although in a different vein. Out of the 1.4 billion overweight people, 500 million are obese (WHO, 2013). As an interesting case in point, Townsend et al. (2001) found Food Insecurity and obesity to be positively related in the United States. An influential paper by Maxwell (1996) outlined three main shifts in the debate on food security since the World Food Conference in 1974: from the global and the national to the household and the individual; from a food first perspective to a livelihood perspective; and from objective indicators to subjective perception. For instance, a household may have the means to acquire the necessary food, but some members of the household might be underfed (for various reasons), or the members may lack knowledge of dietary changes. A simple thing such as lack of nutritional knowledge can lead to deficiencies, as happened in post Green Revolution countries when people changed their staple diets from traditional food grains (millets) and pulses to refined wheat and rice, causing a steep decline in the diet’s micronutrient content (Welch and Graham, 1999; Welch, 2002; Graham et al., 2012). What about people who are ‘food secure’, but only have access to unclean water and poor sanitation? If food security is supposed to ensure good health and nutrition, policymakers should design interventions to achieve nutritional security, guided by measurements of health (Pinstrup-Andersen, 2009). This has broadened the debate on food security to include nutritional security. According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), food security is a necessary but insufficient condition for nutritional security

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  Available until 23 Dec |Learn more

  The $16 Taco

  Contested Geographies of Food, Ethnicity, and Gentrification

  • Pascale Joassart-Marcelli(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • University of Washington Press

    (Publisher)

  Among the food insecure, a distinction is made between those with low and very low food security. The former have little or no indication of reduced food intake but experience diminished quality, vari- ety, and/or desirability of food. The latter show multiple indications of reduced intake and disrupted eating patterns. 7 100 Chapter 4 Lost in these surveys and measurements is the visceral and emotional aspect of hunger, which goes beyond limited access due to insufficient economic resources. If we believe that food is much more than nutrition, then Food Insecurity is also more than not having enough food to eat; it is the inability to gather generations together around a meal, share stories and traditions, discipline children, promote values about health, connect to place, create a home, express identities, and sustain memories. It is also the debilitating pain and visceral reaction provoked by an empty stom- ach—however subjective these may be. When people are deprived of nutri- tious, affordable, accessible, and culturally appropriate food, individual physical health certainly suffers, as evidenced by a large body of research on the effects of Food Insecurity on diabetes, heart disease, and nutrition- related chronic diseases. 8 But it is also the emotional health and well- being of families and communities that are threatened. Thus it is time to broaden the meaning of Food Insecurity beyond “not having enough money to buy food” and to consider the many ways in which hunger is experi- enced, often violently, as a threat to life itself.

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  Food Insecurity

  A Matter of Justice, Sovereignty, and Survival

  • Tamar Mayer, Molly D. Anderson, Tamar Mayer, Molly D. Anderson(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  At heart, every instance of Food Insecurity stems from inequitable power relations. Amartya Sen (1999:16) famously declared that famine has never occurred in a functioning democracy. We could say with equal surety that Food Insecurity does not occur in societies in which power is shared equitably; democracy is a manifestation of equity, where the government is responsive to its people. Every case of Food Insecurity in this volume can be interpreted as resulting from unequal access to resources needed for food production, opportunity, or political voice (and often, from all of these together). Sufficient food is produced for everyone in the world to have adequate calories (Lappé and Collins 2015), at least at the current point in global warming. But how should this food be allocated? Is “the market” adequate to distribute food to places of scarcity, or does it need to be mediated by public policy, perhaps based on recognition of the human right to food and nutrition?

  UN agencies primarily attributed the decline in reliable access to food from 2014 to 2017 to climate change and political conflicts resulting in warfare (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, and WHO 2019). These issues have been compounded by the failure to fully recover from the 2007–08 economic crisis, neoliberal austerity policies, scarcity of essential natural resources and environmental degradation, speculation in agricultural markets, and increasing demand for biofuels by wealthy countries. These contributed to the “food price crisis” of 2008 (McMichael 2009; Wise and Murphy 2013), which was followed by another sharp rise in 2010. Each of these factors alone has had a severe impact on food prices and food security and, because they are intertwined, their impact has been devastating, particularly in countries where governments have not been responsive to immediate needs of their population.

  Climate change

  The effects of climate change on Food Insecurity should be called out explicitly because this is the most dangerous harbinger, largely caused by greenhouse-gas emissions from relatively wealthy countries yet borne mostly by populations in poor countries who have benefited little from burning fossil fuels. Global warming is already 1°C above the postindustrial average, and, if current emission rates continue, the world is on track to hit 1.5°C above that mark as soon as 2030. The impact of global warming on human and natural systems is already apparent, and some of the services that ocean and land ecosystems provide have already changed for the worse. Even if emissions drop drastically in the near future, continued effects are locked in by the amounts of greenhouse gases that are already in the atmosphere. The effects include severe droughts, floods, tropical cyclones and hurricanes, heat waves sufficient to kill livestock and humans, sea-level rise and saltwater intrusion in low-lying coastal areas, and loss of biodiversity, including fish species on which human populations depend.

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  Climate Conditions and Agriculture

  • Hazem Shawky Fouda(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Delve Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Food Insecurity Due to Climate Change and Agricultural Development 7 CONTENTS 7.1. Introduction .................................................................................... 130 7.2. The Space-Time Distribution Of Climate ........................................ 130 7.3. Relationship Between Food Insecurity And Agricultural Development ............................................................ 137 7.4. Possible Ways In Which Food Supply May Contribute To Economic Development ........................................ 138 7.5. Food Problems ................................................................................ 139 7.6. Agricultural Development ............................................................... 144 7.7. Food Policy, A Case Study Of Kenya ............................................... 147 7.8. Research On Food Insecurity .......................................................... 150 Climate Conditions and Agriculture 130 7.1. INTRODUCTION Patterns of agricultural performance in areas of food production cause great concern among planners, donors and politicians. Empirical studies continue to predict a widening gap between projected trends in food production and consumption among developing countries. The UN has had the alleviation of hunger on its agenda for the last 20 years. There is no more important task before the world than the elimination of hunger and malnutrition in all countries. But since 1960s in practically all tropical African countries food production has failed to match population growth. The average rate of growth in average food production per head of population was negative at about 0.7% in 1960s and worsened during the 1970s to about 1.6%. The share of Sub-Saharan Africans living in abject poverty as a percentage of all the poor in the third world is estimated to have grown to 25% from 20% in 2000. Increased food production has become a major goal of world governments.

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  Education, Poverty, Malnutrition and Famine

  • Lorraine Pe Symaco, Colin Brock(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  While overall there are higher numbers of families with Food Insecurity living in urban areas, rural areas have a higher concentration with more persistent poverty and more female-headed families (USDA Economic Research Service 2005). Lack of food in the USA is not the issue causing Food Insecurity. While supermarkets might always be teeming with options, pocketbooks might be bare, transportation problematic or options in certain neighbourhoods may be limited. Healthy food in the USA is expensive. Fresh vegetables, fruits and multi- grains are much more costly than high-sugar, high-fat processed and canned foods. The same is true for high quality protein, with leaner meats being more expensive. White bread, pasta, and canned goods are much more affordable; they also have a longer shelf life so the initial investment seems more worthwhile. Geography can also cause access issues. Urban centres often lack supermarkets and inhabitants with no mode of transportation are confined to the corner stores in the area, which are often pricey and carry limited selection. In cities that have good public transportation this is less of an issue, but many cities in the USA have inefficient or negligible public transportation systems, making it difficult to access quality food. In areas where there are higher concentrations of families using these services, many stores will display signs that they accept food stamps. While there are also assistance programmes for emergency situations such as hurricanes and floods, most hunger-related programmes focus on the immediate nutritional needs rather than responding to the complex cycles of poverty and inequality found in the USA. Education, Poverty, Malnutrition and Famine 162 Yet research has shown repeatedly that there is a large segment of the population living in fragile conditions that make them susceptible to hunger and housing insecurity.

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  The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2019

  Safeguarding Against Economic Slowdowns and Downturns

  • Food and Agriculture Organization(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

    (Publisher)

  Furthermore, inequalities within households help explain why even when economic growth translates into extreme poverty reduction, it may not necessarily reduce Food Insecurity and malnutrition. Thus, reducing inequality plays an important role in reducing both undernourishment and malnutrition. This is true at all times, not only for periods of economic boom. Inequalities are structural characteristics of countries that prevent the most food-insecure and malnourished people from being helped by economic growth, but they also expose and make them more vulnerable during periods of economic turmoil. In fact, evidence indicates that in countries that have greater levels of inequality, economic slowdowns and downturns have a disproportionately negative effect on food and nutrition security. 146 | 90 | THE STATE OF FOOD SECURITY AND NUTRITION IN THE WORLD 2019 This section looks more closely at the different forms of inequality and the evidence on how these inequalities work to shape outcomes of food security and nutrition. Five forms of inequality are explored: income inequality, inequalities between rural and urban populations, inequalities in asset distribution, marginalization and social exclusion, and intra-household inequality. It is important to acknowledge that any analysis on inequality is challenging, as there is a lack of data disaggregated by wealth quintile, gender, age, geography and disability, which poses a significant barrier to addressing inequality and tackling undernourishment and malnutrition in marginalized groups. 147 Data on prevalence and national averages of undernourishment and malnutrition are not sufficient to fully understand and address these issues. Inequality in income distribution Income inequality is a defining issue of our time. It is also a cause of entrenched uncertainty and vulnerability.

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  Food Security For Developing Countries

  • Alberto Valdes(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6 The Nature of Food Insecurity in Colombia Jorge Garcia Garcia This chapter discusses what food security means in the par-ticular context of Colombia. First, it assesses to what extent the variability in aggregate food production and the availability of foreign exchange could represent serious sources of insecurity in food consumption in Colombia, concluding that these are not major concerns. However, there seems to be widespread malnutrition in Colombia because of uneven distribution of income: even minor increases in food prices can induce sig-nificant real income losses that increase the incidence of mal-nutrition in both urban and rural sectors. This chapter continues by discussing policy options for coping with the deterioration of nutritional levels for vulnerable groups. Food Situation in Colombia Most discussions on food security consider foodgrains only. An inadequate definition of food can lead to an incorrect assess-ment of the magnitude of insecurity and the resources needed to reduce or eliminate it. According to a survey conducted in 1972 by the lnstituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar (ICBF), 12 products account for almost 90 percent of the weight of food consumption and contribute 76 percent and 77 percent, respectively, of the calorie and protein consumption of the average Colombian. This average food consumption basket of white-and blue-collar workers of Colombia, presented in Table 6.1, has re-mained unchanged throughout the last 25 years. 1 As shown in 123 124 Jorge Garcia Garcia Table 6.1 Composition of Food Consumption in Colombia in 1972 Share in consumption Food Item Protein Calorie (percent) (percent) Potato 5.4 6.2 Milk 8.5 3.6 Plantain 2.0 5.8 Non-centri fuga 1 sugar 0.8 12.

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