Session 15 – Food Security

Objectives

After completing this lesson, you should be able to:

• Define food security
• Articulate key principles of food security
• Compare and contrast competing perspectives of how to achieve global food security

Key Terms + Concepts

• Food security

Required Readings + Resources

• FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO. 2019. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2019. Safeguarding against economic slowdowns and downturns. Rome, FAO. Retrieved from http://www.fao.org/3/ca5162en/ca5162en.pdf
  • Read the Executive Summary
  • HIGHLY RECOMMENDED - View the FAO website for interactive diagrams and in-depth analysis - http://www.fao.org/state-of-food-security-nutrition/en/

The Fractured Consensus on Global Food Security

The dominant discourse around achieving food security, with a particular emphasis on raising agricultural production, dates back to the early to mid twentieth century (Lang & Barling, 2012). However, the term food security emerged from the 1974 World Food Conference in response to two years of rising food prices and a concern that the global food system was moving towards crisis (Maxwell, 1996). Currently, the most commonly cited definition of food security is from the United Nation Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO): “food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (World Food Summit, 1996 as cited in FAO, 2008, p. 1). As expressed by Mooney and Hunt (2009, p. 470), food security is a powerful concept that resonates across ideological lines: “framing an issue to favor ‘food insecurity’… is strategically dysfunctional under most conditions, even for those whose goals might effectively lead to objectively insecure or unsustainable outcomes”. Yet despite the utility of food security as a consensus frame, dissonance exists due to competing visions for achieving its objectives.

VIDEO - Food: Secret of the Peace

• Disclaimer: This film has potentially disturbing scenes in it, with mature subject matter. Viewer discretion is advised.

This historical film from the National Film Board of Canada provides insight into the social and political context in which the idea of addressing world hunger emerged. Made at the end of WWII, this short film shows scenes of food queues, hunger riots and famine in liberated Europe, pointing out the political danger that lies in starvation conditions. Causes of food shortages and measures taken by the Allies to solve these problems are described.

The food crises of 2007-2008 revealed the fragility of the global food system in maintaining access to minimum levels of food for millions of people. Ironically, the historically highest level of global hunger coincided with two other records: global harvests and profits for the world’s major food corporations (Holt Giménez & Shattuck, 2011). This unsettling co-occurrence revitalized food security debates around the world and sparked an “outpouring of major reports, events and appeals to policymakers to address the global challenge of food security” (Lang & Barling, 2012, p. 1). Analysis of the global food system was revealing significantly different challenges than seen in preceding decades, placing food security as “one of the central ‘master frames’ of early twenty-first century public policy” (Maye & Kirwan, 2013, p. 1). The approach to achieving global food security has been described as fractured, with competing directives on how to meet the demands of a growing population within the new realities of ecological and global resource constraints (Maye and Kirwan, 2013). Mooney and Hunt (2009, p. 471) identified the alleviation of global hunger as a “collective action frame” within the food security master frame, and further distinguished between flat and sharp keys within the hunger frame. A sharp keying of a frame is defined “as critical, suggestive of crisis and a challenge to dominant institutionalized social and discursive conventions”, whereas flat keying “tends to reinforce dominant institutionalized practices” (Mooney and Hunt, 2009, p. 473). The following sections will compare the flat and sharp keys within the hunger frame of food security, punctuating the divergent beliefs and ideological commitments that distinguish the two.

The flat key of the hunger frame of food security has at its core the belief that “food insecurity must be centrally addressed by producing more food” (Lang and Barling, 2012, p. 1). Tomlinson (2013, p. 82) describes the flat key as the “new productivist” approach, similar to Lang and Heasman’s (2004) articulation of the productionist paradigm, whereby the food supply chain came to prioritize increasing agricultural yields over all other elements. This approach “lends itself to seeking technological solutions contributing to the further intensification of agriculture” (Tomlinson, 2013, p. 82). In addition, capital investment is deemed necessary to increase agricultural productivity. Accompanied with increased efficiency in distribution and storage, food prices will naturally decrease and access and availability to basic foodstuffs will therefore improve (Lang and Heasman, 2004).

Proponents of this approach often state two projections that have become pillars of global food security discourse (Maye & Kirwan, 2013) – food production needs to rise by 50% by 2030; and, food production needs to double by 2050 to feed 9 billion . This narrative implies that food security is a global issue and therefore the solution lies in developing a more efficient global food system (Tomlinson, 2013). This is in line with the neoliberal trend of the modern food system, which advocates “expanding global markets and increasing output through corporate-led technological innovation, and pushing peasant producers out of agriculture to make way for more efficient ‘entrepreneurial’ farmers” (Holt Giménez & Shattuck, 2011, p. 116). Further, emerging national agriculture programs are being encouraged to specialize in a small range of commodity crops to benefit from comparative advantage within an increasing liberalized network of global markets. The key actors in the flat key are the international finance and development institutions, transnational food corporations, the FAO of the United Nations, and philanthropy capitalism (Holt Giménez & Shattuck, 2011; Mooney and Hunt, 2009). Despite considerable evidence of the limitations and detrimental consequences to achieving food security through this linear perspective, the flat key of the hunger frame continues to be the dominant, status quo frame for international food policy.

Critics characterize the flat key perspective as oversimplifying a complex set of issues through a singular focus on increasing availability of food by maximizing agricultural production for export markets (see Sage, 2013; Lang and Heasman, 2004, Tomlinson, 2013). Furthermore, evidence suggests that “the era of ‘productivist’ agriculture produced profits for a few, reduced food security for the many, and used resources at an unsustainable rate” (Allen, 2013, p. 135). In the early 1980s, Sen (1981) distinguished between food availability and access, noting that hunger is a condition of individuals not having enough to eat, which is significantly different than there not being enough to eat. “Whether and how starvation relates to food supply is a matter for factual investigation” (Sen, 1981, p. 1). The productivist privileging of techno-scientific, reductionist ways of knowing coupled with neoliberal, free-market policies creates a structural framework that marginalizes and excludes poor rural farmers and poor urban consumers alike (Allen, 2013; Lang & Heasman, 2004; Sage, 2013; Shiva, 1993). Additionally, this perspective overlooks two pressures facing the global food system: the nutrition transition (the process by which, as societies become richer, diets shift towards more sweeter, fattier, processed foods, which in turn generate non-communicable, diet-related ill-health patterns) (Popkin, 2001) and global food waste, which some estimates place close to 30% of post-harvest calories (Parfitt, Barthel, & Macnaughton, 2010). Both of these pressures are considered as significant to feeding 9 billion mouths as increasing food production, but have been noticeably sidelined from food security analysis at the international level (Tomlinson, 2013). As noted by Lang and Barling (2012, p. 3) on the FAO’s High Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis in 2010, “missing from [discussion] was any comprehensive attempt to address the effects of deeper structural environmental and natural resource depletion factors on demand and the complexities of the evolving global demands for food”.

The sharp key of the hunger framing of food security is aptly characterized by the following quote from Hans Herren, co-chair of the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) report:

“The question we keep hearing today is how will the world increase food production by 70 percent to meet rising food demands and feed more that [sic] a billion hungry people. A growing consensus is asking whether this is the right question. 400 of the world’s top agricultural scientists asked a different question: How do we rethink our global food system so that it can feed people, create healthy communities and economies, and sustain the planet” (Herren, 2010 as quoted in Tomlinson, 2013, p. 87).

Recognizing food systems as socio-ecological systems, the sharp key seeks to address the multifunctional nature of food production, processing, distribution, and consumption in relation to ecological, economic, social, and human health (McIntyre et al., 2009). Due to the inherent complexity and uncertainty that characterize the current food system, food security policy needs to shift from maximizing one objective, agricultural yields, to optimizing inter-functionality across all components (EU SCAR, 2013; McIntyre et al., 2009). This transition requires knowledge systems beyond the natural sciences, inclusive of the social sciences and local, traditional ways of knowing (Allen, 2013; McIntyre et al., 2009). This also involves a critical analysis of objectives that seek to apply universal solutions and best practices, most often developed in the global North and requiring capital- and resource- intensive technologies. The sharp key recognizes the value of locally adapted, context-dependent, low-technology solutions to issues of sustainability in the modern food system – solutions characterized as cases of “good practices” (Horlings & Marsden, 2011, p. 450).

Concerning distribution and market mechanisms, the sharp key framing does not exclude the possibility of agricultural production for export markets; it prioritizes domestic consumption and the practice of regional food storage capacities over reliance on global commodity crop markets in times of need (Mooney and Hunt, 2009). The sharp key can be seen in the discourse and efforts of food sovereignty organizations like La Via Campesina and Food First as well as the increasing theoretical and empirical support for agroecological production practices (Holt-Giménez & Altieri, 2013; Horlings & Marsden, 2011; Wittman, 2011).

References

• Allen, P. (2013). Facing food security. Journal of Rural Studies, 29, 135–138.
• EU SCAR. (2013). Agricultural knowledge and innovation systems towards 2020: an orientation paper on linking innovation and research. Brussels: Publications Office. Retrieved from http://bookshop.europa.eu/uri?target=EUB:NOTICE:KI0313536:EN:HTML
• FAO. (2008). An Introduction to the Basic Concepts of Food Security (Practical Guides) (p. 3). Rome: EC - FAO Food Security Programme. Retrieved from www.foodsec.org/docs/concepts_guide.pdf
• Holt-Giménez, E., & Altieri, M. A. (2013). Agroecology, Food Sovereignty, and the New Green Revolution. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 37(1), 90–102.
• Holt Giménez, E., & Shattuck, A. (2011). Food crises, food regimes and food movements: rumblings of reform or tides of transformation? Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(1), 109–144.
• Horlings, L. G., & Marsden, T. K. (2011). Towards the real green revolution? Exploring the conceptual dimensions of a new ecological modernisation of agriculture that could “feed the world.” Global Environmental Change, 21(2), 441–452.
• Lang, T., & Barling, D. (2012). Food security and food sustainability: reformulating the debate. The Geographical Journal, 178(4), 313–326.
• Lang, T., & Heasman, M. (2004). Food wars: the global battle for mouths, minds and markets. Earthscan.
• Maxwell, S. (1996). Food security: a post-modern perspective. Food Policy, 21(2), 155–170.
• Maye, D., & Kirwan, J. (2013). Food security: A fractured consensus. Journal of Rural Studies, 29, 1–6.
• McIntyre, B. D., Herren, H., Wakhungu, J., & Watson, R. (Eds.). (2009). Synthesis report: a synthesis of the global and sub-global IAASTD reports. Washington, DC: Island Press.
• Parfitt, J., Barthel, M., & Macnaughton, S. (2010). Food waste within food supply chains: quantification and potential for change to 2050. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 365(1554), 3065–3081.
• Popkin, B. M. (2001). The nutrition transition and obesity in the developing world. The Journal of Nutrition, 131(3), 871S–873S.
• Sage, C. (2013). The interconnected challenges for food security from a food regimes perspective: Energy, climate and malconsumption. Journal of Rural Studies, 29, 71–80.
• Sen, A. (1981). Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford University Press.
• Shiva, V. (1993). Monocultures of the mind: perspectives on biodiversity and biotechnology. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Tomlinson, I. (2013). Doubling food production to feed the 9 billion: A critical perspective on a key discourse of food security in the UK. Journal of Rural Studies, 29, 81–90.
• Wittman, H. (2011). Food Sovereignty: A New Rights Framework for Food and Nature? Environment and Society: Advances in Research, 2(1), 87–105.

Tutorial Session

In your tutorial session, two groups will be debating an issue from the week’s readings. See course assignment description for session details.