Definitions
There is no straightforward, universally accepted definition of food security. Most versions stipulate secure access to sufficient and affordable nutritious food. Such conditions for food security can be assessed on any scale, from a single household to the global population.
Farming rice in Kaduna State, Nigeria © Kate Holt / IRIN News
In its least serious degree, food insecurity indicates only the risk of hunger, not necessarily its presence. By contrast, chronic food insecurity denotes a constant condition of hunger.
Famine is the most extreme state of food insecurity. It exists where a series of hunger indicators, including mortality, cross critical thresholds set by the UN. Although very rare, famine has been declared for regions of southern Somalia in a series of UN announcements during 2011.
Hunger Goals
The first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) falls short of food security aspirations in seeking only to reduce by half the proportion of the world’s population experiencing hunger.
Girls waiting for food in Burundi © International Committee of the Red Cross
The first of two indicators for measuring hunger is the “minimum dietary energy requirement” declared for each country by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Depending on age and gender profile, the figure is typically around 2,000 kilocalories per day for light activity.
Political promises to eradicate hunger date back decades. Current global per capita food production exceeds the FAO threshold. Yet still the number of people lacking access to the minimum diet has risen from 824 million in 1990, the MDG baseline year, to 925 million in 2010.
Due to population growth over this period, the upward trend in hunger converts into a fall on the MDG formula, but only from 20% to 16% of the population of developing countries. In sub-Saharan Africa the figure is close to 30%. Prospects for achieving the 2015 global MDG target of 10% are very poor.
The second MDG indicator is the proportion of children under five years who are underweight in relation to their age. This figure in developing countries has reduced only from 30% to 23% in the period 1990-2009, far short of the 2015 target of 10%. There has been no improvement at all since 1995 amongst poor families in South Asia, where the incidence of underweight children is 43%, according to the 2011 MDG progress report.
Development agencies point out that these MDG benchmarks for hunger place too much emphasis on quantity rather than quality of food. The absence of vital protein and micro-nutrients such as iron and iodine impairs the ability to learn and reduces resistance to disease, especially in young children. One third of child mortality is attributed to malnutrition.
Steve Wiggins, Research Fellow at Overseas Development Institute, suggests that steps needed to achieve global food security are not rocket science.
World Food Prices
World food prices are determined by traders active on international commodity markets. They are influenced by a range of factors, real and imagined, of which the most important is the price of oil. The inputs and operations of modern farming are highly dependent on oil products.
The outcome of this pricing process impinges on over 75 developing countries which are net importers of food. Almost all those classified as Least Developed Countries fall into this category.
When the FAO Cereal Price Index doubled in the year to April 2008, food riots in 23 countries prompted a global crisis. Another round of increases, of similar extent, was triggered in mid-2010 in the aftermath of poor harvests and export bans in Russia and Ukraine. The transmission of these international prices to local markets varies in degree and the consequences remain uncertain.
World Trade Rules Right to Food
“The fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger” is established in Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the branch of international law inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Emergency food in Western Kenya © Peter Armstrong
A rights-based approach to food security imposes obligations on national governments to establish non-discriminatory and non-political laws to ensure that their populations have access to adequate food.
The FAO reports that over 100 countries include either a direct or implied reference to the right to food in their constitutions. However, the gap between intent and implementation remains too wide. Almost one billion people find little consolation in the right to food.
Rising hunger figures spurred a World Summit on Food Security in November 2009. Countries were asked to reassert the right to food through a resolution to eradicate hunger by 2025. Most world leaders refused to attend and the motion had to be withdrawn.
Nonetheless, campaigners continue to encourage the poor to view food security as a right for which their rulers are accountable, rather than a gift of charity.
Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, explains the importance of the right to food in the context of the 2008 crisis of rising food prices, from Right To Food
Global Divide in Agriculture
Organic beef and two veg provided by Hampshire County Council Catering Services for UK schools
Nowhere is the global divide between rich and poor countries more apparent than in the contrasting profile of agriculture. In the developed world, farmers manage sophisticated capital-intensive businesses. They deliver the dream of every government - cheap food, bursting with choice and free of shortages.
In the poorest developing countries, most farming resembles the primitive rural economy of 19th century Europe. 500 million smallholders labour on plots of less than two hectares, attempting to feed about two billion people, almost a third of humanity.
This model struggles against the elements and creates one of the ironies of the modern world - that three-quarters of global hunger is located amongst farmers and their workers. Most of the remaining quarter is found amongst the urban poor.
World Food Prices
World food prices are determined by traders active on international commodity markets. They are influenced by a range of factors, real and imagined, of which the most important is the price of oil. The inputs and operations of modern farming are highly dependent on oil products.
2008 food price riots in Burkina Faso © Brahima Ouedraogo / IRIN News
The outcome of this pricing process impinges on over 75 developing countries which are net importers of food. Almost all those classified as Least Developed Countries fall into this category.
When the FAO Cereal Price Index doubled in the year to April 2008, food riots in 23 countries prompted a global crisis. Another round of increases, of similar extent, was triggered in mid-2010 in the aftermath of poor harvests and export bans in Russia and Ukraine. The transmission of these international prices to local markets varies in degree and the consequences remain uncertain.
This succession of unstable price hikes in global food markets offers strong evidence that the world’s trade regime for agriculture is unfit for purpose. It certainly fails by any measure of justice between rich and poor countries.
The trade trap © Television Trust for the Environment
Ambitions of the poorer countries of the modern world to copy this approach remain unfulfilled. This is largely because they are bound by the system of open market rules adopted by the World Trade Organisation in 1995. At the same time, the richer countries refused to unravel their own protectionist model.
This hypocrisy remains a fundamental barrier to development and food security. Developing countries find their domestic markets undercut by cheap food imports dumped by rich countries. Exporters encounter trade barriers erected in Europe and US.
According to a report by the group of richer OECD countries, the total support paid to their agriculture producers in 2009 totalled $253 billion. This is more than six times the UN’s estimate of the annual cost of eradicating hunger by 2025.
Climate Change
The food injustice meted out to the poorest countries by trade rules pales into insignificance in relation to climate change.
Climate models predict that richer countries in temperate zones will benefit from higher crop yields within the two degree temperature rise envisaged in international climate change negotiations.
Dead and dying animals in Arbajahan, northern Kenya © Brendan Cox / Oxfam International/Flickr
By contrast, crop yields and grazing quality in tropical regions are already at their limit of temperature sensitivity. Higher temperatures will shorten the growing seasons of staple crops. Furthermore, temperatures in Africa are projected to rise faster than the global average.
A 2009 report by the International Food Policy Research Institute estimated that, in the absence of resolute government action, daily food availability in sub-Saharan Africa will average 500 calories less per person in 2050.
Recent research by Oxfam concludes that any food price increases projected by conventional supply and demand analysis in the period to 2030 will be roughly doubled by the effects of climate change.
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