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

the number of hungry people leaping 40 million in a few weeks to exceed 1 billion (FAO,2008b) has led to renewed concerns about hunger; the notion of food security has takencentre stage in many fora. While a few argue that the world will be quite capable of feedingthe predicted 2050 population of nine billion people (e.g. Paillard et al., 2011; The Times, 14January 2011), the majority view is that this is by no means certain in a sustainable manner.Food security concerns have hence rapidly ascended policy, societal and science agendas inmany countries and have been the topic of special issues of leading scientific journals (e.g.Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 2010 vol 365; Science, 2010, vol 372), government documents (e.g.Defra, 2009; USDA-ERS, 2009) and leading high-circulation media such as the Economist(21 November 2009) and Time (26 October 2009).Almost overnight governments began issuing statements about food security (in contrast toagricultural development and food production) and the media relayed these to civil society,enhancing political interest. In their July 2009 joint statement, for instance, the G8 heads ofstate agreed “to act with the scale and urgency needed to achieve sustainable global foodsecurity” (G8, 2009). Calls from research funders echoed these sentiments and ‘food security’is now commonly seen in the titles of research proposals, papers, books and other scienceoutputs. Importantly, however – and despite the high-level nature of the 1996 World FoodSummit, and with it the much more holistic understanding of what is entailed in food security– a large proportion of the discussion under this banner continues to address issues related tofood production rather than the broader food security concept. When addressing foodsecurity, it is crucial to take a broad view. This will of course include the fundamentallyimportantpart that producing food plays, but discussions must not be restricted to this narrowview; the impact of the 2007-08 food price spike underscored the concept of economic accessto food being critically important, rather than food supply per se.An historical emphasis on food production researchThe food production aspects of food security have long been the subject of major scientificresearch investment. In 1843 the Rothamsted Experimental Station was established in theUK, while the latter part of the 19th century saw the rapid growth of commercial plantbreedingin Germany (Harwood, 2005). Despite these many years’ research, there is still aneed to establish how to produce more food given anticipated demand (Royal Society, 2009).However, satisfying these increased demands poses huge challenges for the sustainability ofboth food production, and the terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and the services they provideto society (Tilman et al., 2002).Conscious of the negative environmental consequences of most current food productionmethods, it is clear that the necessary gains will have to be made in a more environmentallybenignmanner (Gregory and Ingram, 2000; Foresight, 2011). To this end, research hasincreasingly focused on the production system (rather than just on the plant or animalcomponent) seeking to increase the efficiency by which inputs (especially nitrogen and3