Lectures Global Food Security

Global Food Security Alle hoorcolleges
PPS-31306 Global Food Security Hoorcollege 1 30-10-2017 Introduction

Definition of food security

 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
 We miss sustainability and social access in this definition

The four pillars of food security

 Food security definitions have four common elements
o Availability (sufficient supply)
o Access (production, purchase, food aid)
o Utilisation (nutritional quality, safety)
o Stability (no shocks) and sustainability (longer term)

Availability

 Sufficient quantity available: in each situation at each scale level either locally produced or in
the market (trade)
 Quantity is mostly expressed in energy (Kcal, joules)

Access

 Access to food can be through
o Own production (crop and animal production)
o Purchasing power (income)
o Bartering (exchange)
o Social relations (gifts)
 Food availability can be high, still some cannot have access

Utilisation

 Nutritional quality  nutrition security
 Level of the individual, care for the vulnerable
o Expressed in individual level, baby and elderly need other type of food
 Knowledge & skills about acquisition, preparation and consumption of nutritionally adequate
diets
 Food safety  disease prevention (hygiene, water & sanitation, regulation, proper storage)
 Food safety  free from toxic components (supply chain, contamination during production or
processing, regulations)

Stability

 Stability is absence of or coping with vulnerability (risk, shocks)
 Risks: e.g. loss of a job, decrease in income, increase in prices (consumers) or decrease in
prices (farmers), partial crop failure
 Risk measurable = f (chance that something happens x impact)
 Shocks: can be unexpected death or diseases of a family member, flood or drought (egas
result of climate change), war, ...
 Effective coping strategies to deal with risks & shocks


1

, o Short term: reduce meals/day, gather wild food, sale of assets, storage of harvest,
social capital (family or village support)
o Longer term: diversified sources of income, seasonal migration, diversity of
agricultural practices, insurance systems, grain banks

Sustainability

 No long-term adverse effects of food production and processing, such as pollution or
degradation /depletion of the resource base (egsoils, water)
 No decrease in food production, access, utilisation in view of longer term trends such as
population growth and climate change
 No (eternal) dependency on gifts or charity but rather self-reliance

At which level to determine food security?

 International
o Enough food produced to feed the world
o Impact of climate change  international problem
o Competing claims on land (food, fuel, feed, biodiversity)
o Impact of multinational?
 National
o Local production or import
 Policy makers can decide
o Distribution between urban (city) and rural (country side)
o Policies: to support local agricultural production or to guarantee food safety
o Many food security indicators are determined at national level
o Sustainable development goals (SGDs) are assessed at this level
 Household
o Self sufficiency through food production
o Income to buy food
o Cooping strategies in case of problems
o Livelihood strategies
 Individual
o Distribution among family members
o Food quality in relation to specific demands
 Children, pregnant women, diseases

Food systems: the new concept

 Not yet consensus about what food system exactly is
o Three figures are currently more widely used
1. Food system components




2. Food system dynamics

2

, 3. Food system drivers




Food security is mainly addressed in SDG 2

 Goal 2End hunger, achieve food security and improved
nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture
o Food security is expressed SDG goal 2
 Nutrition
o Stunting
o Wasting
 Production
o Double/ha/FTE
o Sust. practices
o Genetic diversity
 Infrastructure/macro
o (Knowledge) infrastructure
o Trade
o Markets and prices


Development goals

The millennium development goals

 2000-2015
 8 goals
 18 targets

3

, MDG’s directly related to GFS

 Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
o Reduce by half the proportion of people whose income is less than $1.25 a day
o Reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger
 Goal 4 Reduce child mortality
o Reduce by two thirds the mortality of children under five

The MDGs

 Did we reach the MDGs in 2015?
 Or at least make progress?

Target: halving the proportion of world hunger

 1990 (23.2 %) and 2015 (12.9%) almost reached.
 Yet number of hungry declined not so much 1 billion to 780 million

Target: reducing by half people living in poverty

 Target was already reached 5 years ago
 1 billion people lifted out of extreme poverty since 1990
 Poverty rate in developing countries reduced from 47% to 14%
 Huge differences per region: More than 40% of people in sub-Saharan Africa still live in
poverty

Target: reduce by half child <5 underweight

 From 1 in 4 children under weight (1990) to 1 in 7 (2015)
 Indicator is very income/poverty related

Target: reduce by 2/3 <5 years child mortality

 Since 1990 child mortality rate dropped by 50 % (from 90-43/1000 births)
 Despite population growth a decline from 12.6 to 6 million children (2015) of which 3 million
in sub-Saharan Africa.
 In SSA absolute numbers declined from 179 to 86/1000 births
 but high population growth  difficult to keep up improvement and reach target in future

Some success, yet (negative)

 the poorest and most vulnerable are left behind
 800 million people still live in extreme poverty and suffer from hunger, without access to
basic services
 Huge (and widening) gaps exist between the poorest and richest, and between rural & urban
areas
 Sub Saharan Africa lags behind in many aspects
 Gender inequality persists
 Climate change and environmental degradation undermine progress, and the poor suffer
most

Sustainable development goals

 2015-2030
 17 goals

4