As demand grows and adverse events create production instability, food security has come to the fore as a global challenge. Since the world produces enough food to feed the starving, what are the other factors at play in this issue?
By Adeline Teoh
Pushing peas around my plate earnt the refrain “Eat up! There are starving children in Africa” from my frustrated mother. As a child I was determined to save up the unwanted morsels and send them to Africa myself. Little did I know that decades later the problem would be much the same: not of volume, but distribution.
“In the 1970s food security was largely about increasing production because of the idea that there wasn’t enough food in the world. From the 1980s onwards we started to realise that it wasn’t about not having enough food, it’s also about issues of access and distribution,” explains Dr Bethaney Turner, Assistant Professor in International Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra. “We may have plenty of food in the world but it’s not necessarily getting to the people who need it.”
Poverty and undernourishment
Poverty is the single biggest factor that correlates to food insecurity. The vulnerability is threefold: the impoverished spend a greater percentage of their income on food, which means that price spikes disproportionately affect them; people on a lower income tend to live in areas where food distribution is difficult; and the poor are less able to afford the infrastructure that prevents food spoilage, such as refrigeration and storage, so are limited to the types of food they can consume.
“Hunger and poverty pretty much go hand in hand,” says Kelly Dent, Economic Justice senior policy adviser at Oxfam Australia. She believes the solution is less about aid and more about empowering smallscale producers in the areas where food shortages occur. “Two-thirds of the hungry in the world are smallscale producers. We’re not saying smallscale producers can feed the world, but we are saying with the right support they can feed themselves and that would lead to a dramatic reduction in hunger.”
Food security expert Professor Chris Barrett, from the Department of Economics at USA’s Cornell University, agrees. “We can’t feed the world but we can help the world feed itself. Prime agricultural exporting countries like the United States and Australia will remain crucial as sources of supply for net food importing countries, but the solutions to [food insecurity]have to be found and engineered in Africa and Asia where the demand is highest.”
Because food security is a complex issue involving multilateral social, political, and economic stakeholders, the solutions must also work across this spectrum. “We’ve been in this position before and we managed to work our way out of the prospective threats to global security. This is a challenge we are capable of meeting, the trick is whether we will be able to do so,” says Barrett.
“It is simply taken for granted that agriculture will work very well, that we’ll have ample food, we won’t run out of land, we won’t run out of water. That’s dangerous because it is feasible to meet the challenge but it isn’t feasible to meet the challenge without a concerted effort, without significant investments. The coming wave of population growth, urbanisation and income growth will pose challenges the likes of which we’ve never seen for some time.”
Opposing problems
Population growth and urbanisation juxtapose two problems. Poorer people tend to have larger families, which adds to demand for food. If this population growth occurs in areas where food distribution is already ailing, it puts pressure on access. However, the movement of migrants to towns and cities is also problematic for distribution because people live farther away from where food is grown. “This puts increasing demands on distribution channels and changes the nature of food demand by putting a greater premium on processed foods, which adds to cost and tends to lead to the deterioration of dietary quality,” says Barrett.
Despite poverty’s relationship with hunger, income growth can also test demand. Dietary transition as a result of income growth often results in higher demand for animal-sourced food, which “requires the production of feed as an intermediate input into animal production,” Barrett notes.
Governance and food security
Many incidents of food shortage are actually management problems, and thus solutions must come from better governance. Governments must ensure they meet the needs of all their constituents, paying particular attention to the most vulnerable. Land and water management, for example, is a crucial area where government can support smallscale farmers and marginalised populations against investments that may not be in communities’ best interests.
“Increased demand for land and water means increased pressure on natural resources, increased demand for biofuels takes away from productive land that grows food for people—it also displaces predominantly poor communities,” explains Dent. She adds that newer forms of biofuels are fortunately about converting waste and are not dependent on largescale tracts of land.
Waste management is also a key issue. Globally, between one-third to a half of all food is wasted: in developed countries, food waste occurs mainly due to overconsumption; in the developing world, it’s food spoilage due to a large of proper infrastructure. Education will play a big role in minimising waste in the developed world, Turner says. “The more connected people are to the food system, the more likely they are to be attuned to the issues of food security, and the more likely they are to be committed to minimising their food waste.”
In the developing world, the solution tends towards co-location of food production and the hungry. Importantly, the food also has to work in context of not just the environment, but also the culture where it is grown, Turner emphasises. “It isn’t just about filling people’s nutritional requirements. Because food has such a fundamental social and cultural context if that’s not attended to, people will not necessarily eat the food even when starving.”
And that’s why support for smallscale producers will address the heart of the problem, she believes. “Smallscale farming contributes to genetic diversity; broadacre potentially endangers biodiversity. More support for smallscale farms can have a significant impact on food security.”
Dent agrees. “Smallscale producers are incredibly resourceful and resilient. They’re not passive victims, it’s just that they don’t receive the support that they need.”
