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

SummaryBackgroundFood is a fundamental human need and achieving food security is of paramount importanceto society at large. Driven by the requirement to feed ever increasing human demand, majorscientific and technical advances have been made in the production of food. However, despitetremendous success in maintaining food production ahead of per capita need on a globalbasis, history shows that increasing production alone does not satisfy food security for all: in2010 about one billion people were food-insecure. Production alone is manifestly not the onlyfactor.Food security is a state or condition. While earlier definitions of food security stressed foodproduction, a commonly-used definition stemming from the 1996 World Food Summit statesthat food security is met when “all people, at all times, have physical and economic access tosufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for anactive and healthy life”. The emphasis changed from increasing food production to increasingaccess to food for all.Food security concerns have recently rapidly ascended policy, societal and science agendasdriven the growing realisation of the scale of future requirements: 50% more food will beneeded by 2030, and possibly 100% more meat by 2050. While a large proportion of thediscussion under the food security banner continues to address issues related to foodproduction, when addressing food security it is crucial to take a broad view, including – butnot being limited to – the fundamentally-important part that producing food plays; the impactof the 2007-08 food price spike underscored the concept of economic access to food beingcritically important, rather than food supply per se. Meanwhile, it is now clear that climatechange will affect crop growth in many parts of the world, with the most deleterious impactsanticipated in the developing regions. New concepts, tools and approaches are clearly neededto address the broader food security agenda. Their development is all the more urgent giventhe additional complications that global environmental change (GEC, including climatechange) is already bringing to the many for whom food security is already far from easy.Addressing the complex nature of food security requires greatly enhanced interdisciplinarity,with social science, economics and the humanities all playing critical roles in addition to thebiophysical sciences.The late 1990’s saw the emergence of an international GEC research project (GlobalEnvironmental Change and Food Systems, GECAFS, 2001-2011). The goal of GECAFS was“to determine strategies to cope with the impacts of global environmental change on foodsystems and to assess the environmental and socioeconomic consequences of adaptiveresponses aimed at improving food security”. GECAFS planning recognised that research toaddress this challenging goal needed to be set within the context of food systems, rather thanjust agricultural systems. This helped to identify and integrate the links between a number of139