From Food Production to Food Security - Global Environmental ...

2010 about 925 million people had to go to bed hungry (FAO, 2010). Production alone ismanifestly not the only factor. Increasingly, and especially since the 1996 World FoodSummit (FAO, 1996b; FAO, 1996a), the notion of food security is not so much one of foodproduction but more relates to access to food. A further dimension is the nutritional contentand, if one also includes the fact that some two billion people are iron-deficient worldwide,the 2010 FAO estimate of 925 million food-insecure is a gross underestimate (Pinstrup-Andersen, 2009).Food security is a state or condition. It is a flexible concept as reflected in the many attemptsat definition in research and policy usage (FAO, 2003), and numerous definitions of foodsecurity thus exist. Even by 1992 Maxwell and Smith had counted over 200 (Spring, 2009),and more are still being formulated (e.g. Defra, 2006). Nonetheless, a commonly-useddefinition stemming from the 1996 World Food Summit states that food security is met when“all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritiousfood to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”. Thisdefinition built on the key work by Amartya Sen (Sen, 1981) in which he demonstrated thatfamine occurs not only from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms fordistributing food. So, not only does the definition bring in a wide range of issues related to afuller understanding of food security, but some key words such as “food production” and“agriculture” – which might have been expected in such a definition – are not included; theemphasis changed from increasing food production to increasing access to food for all.The majority of more recent definitions of food security share the notion of access to food asbeing the key aspect. These definitions are manifestly valuable in raising the profile of themany factors that contribute to food security in addition to producing food. The nutritionaland food safety dimensions of food feature explicitly, as do the roles of wealth and foodprices which underpin the fundamentally-important notion of ‘affordability’ (“economicaccess”). Other dimensions are more implicit: the notion of “preferences” implies not onlywhat we like to eat, but also the function food plays in, for instance, our social and culturalnorms. The idea of “all people, at all times” implies both equitable allocation within societyand stability of sufficiency. Further, although again not explicit in the definition, spatiallevels higher than the agricultural plot are implied: “physical access” introduces the criticallyimportant issues of proximity, storage and distribution which in turn indicate the importanceof food trade locally and internationally.From an ‘industrialised world’ viewpoint, the notion of food security (or more correctly, foodinsecurity) has long been associated with ‘developing world’ issues, and has hence been thepurview of development agencies, rather than government departments and other nationalagencies concerned with domestic agendas. Indeed, until recently, ‘food security’ has notbeen a priority policy topic in the industrialised world and in the UK, for instance, few – ifany – government documents since the Second World War included the phrase ‘foodsecurity’ in the title. Recently, however, there has been a growing realisation of the scale offuture requirements: 50% more food will be needed by 2030, and possibly 100% more meatby 2050 (Godfray et al., 2010b). This, coupled with the 2007-08 food price spike which saw2