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

future climate scenarios) disrupt food storage and distribution systems (as vividly seen inPakistan in 2010), and contribute to raising food prices on the international markets (as seenfollowing the Australian drought also in 2010).So how has research aimed at encompassing a broader food security agenda developed?The economics and social science research communities have been addressing the broaderperspectives on food security for several decades. Socioeconomic aspects have been animportant component of farming systems research since the early 1970s, and Duckham andMasefield (1970) noted that the relevance of research and technology to any farming systemcan only be assessed with a knowledge of both the ecological and economic factors operatingon that system. Since the World Food Conference in 1974 researchers have been interested inlivelihoods at household and individual levels, an important determinant of food securitygiven the need of many to buy food (Maxwell, 1996), while more recent work has studied therole of food prices (e.g. Johnston, 1984; FAO, 2009a) and institutions (e.g. Maxwell, 1995;Karanja, 1996).These developments were however largely uncoupled from research by the biophysicalcommunity but, given the multiple dimensions of food security, the need for interdisciplinary,even trans-disciplinary, approaches is now well accepted (Liverman and Kapadia, 2010; UKGlobal Food Security Programme, 2011). Indeed, food security research is in fact a very goodexample of the need for much enhanced interdisciplinarity, with social science, economicsand the humanities all playing critical roles in addition to the biophysical sciences (Pálsson etal., 2011), and accepting this acknowledges contributions of many different disciplines.Early work by the GEC research community on food security recognised the need to thinkbroadly (as distinct to limiting work on crop productivity), and initially addressed the notionof ‘food provision’ (Ingram and Brklacich, 2002; Ingram and Brklacich, 2006: Paper 1). Thiswork embraced the important notion that food provision 1 is governed by both the availabilityof, and access to, food. Access to food was noted as a function of economic potential,physiological potential (e.g. nutritional quality) and food availability. Food availabilitydepends on production and distribution, with food production being a function of yield perunit area and the area harvested.Yield per unit area (or productivity) is a function of genetic potential (G), environment (E)and management (M). This approach is particularly useful in stressed environments (Spiertzand Ewert, 2009) and it is hence the “E” component which has attracted the considerableinterest of GEC researchers given that GEC is usually associated with increased biophysicalstress. (It is worth noting that the bulk of the GEC ‘food’ literature addresses crops, andhence the notion of crop yield, hectares under cropping, etc. dominates; livestock andfisheries have some prominence, ‘wild food’ hardly any.)1 The term ‘food provision’ was later dropped in favour of ‘food security’ so as to move away from the notion ofproviding food and towards the notion of access to food encapsulated in the FAO 1996 definition.5