Chapter 10: Food Security

Textbook: The Age of Sustainable Development 

I. Sustainable Food Supply and the End of Hunger

Global food security is one of the greatest challenges of sustainable development due to the continuous increase of the world’s population and environmental changes. The problem of food insecurity is more complicated for four main reasons:

1. A significant share of the world population today is malnourished.
2. The global population continues to grow.
3. Climate change and other environmental changes threaten future food production.
4. The food system itself is a major contributor to climate change the other environmental harms.

II. Farm Systems, Ecology, and Food Security

There is no "one size fits all" when it comes to farming or to methods to increase farm yields (p.327).

III. How Environmental Change Threatens the Food System

• Invasive species are another issue. This is when animal or plant species are deliberately or accidentally relocated from one environment to another environment, which can derange the entire ecology (p.336).

IV. How the Food System Threatens the Environment

• the agricultural systems themselves are a source of the threat to future food production. The arrows of causation run in two directions. On the one side is environmental change that threatens food production. Yet at the same time, agriculture as it is currently practiced gravely threatens the natural environment.
• there will have to be distinctive, localized problem solving in order to make local farm systems compatible with conservation of ecosystem functions, the preservation of biodiversity, and the reduction of human impacts on the climate system and freshwater supplies.

V. Toward a Sustainable Global Food Supply

• BAU will mean an increase in food insecurity in some parts of the world (p.347).
• How do we move to a SD trajectory? Because of the complexity of the food system; the interlinkage of land use, nitrogen use, and chemical pollutants; and the vulnerability of crops to higher temperatures, the kinds of responses that are needed will have to be varied, holistic in nature, and carefully tailored to local contexts. This is among the toughest SD challenges that we face, because the world is in crisis and the problems will tend to get worse. It is not easy to say that one region will bail out the others, because all regions will have stresses. There will be no magic key that will suddenly make it possible to solve this problem. Each region is going to have to identify its own pathways to sustainable agriculture (p.348).
• Finally, we have to take responsibility ourselves for our personal health and for the way we approach the issues of food as individuals. Massive epidemics of obesity show that something is seriously wrong with prevailing diets. .. The conclusion is as we have noted time and again: the pathway to SD involves behavior change, public awareness, political and individual responsibility, and the mobilization of new systems and technologies that can dramatically reduce the pressures on the natural environment and help make our economy and way of life more resilient to eh environmental changes already underway (p.351).

Data Activities & Discussion

Malnutrition
Go to Gapminder World (http://www.gapminder.org/world ).

For the X-axis, do not "search" but find “Malnutrition, weight for age (% of children under 5)” from the items. For the Y, plot log “Income per person.”

i) In 2005, which country appeared to have the highest percentage of malnourished children?
ii) What is China’s percentage of malnutrition in 1990, 2000, and 2010?

Now do not "search" but find "Food supply (kilocalories /person /day)" from the items, while the income per capita remains.
iii) In 2013, which countries appeared to have the lowest food supply?
iv) Check the food supply in China, Japan, the USA, and Zambia; and play from 1961 to 2013. Explain what did you find.

Japanese Entry

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