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Book Review
Battle against hunger
RAGHU DAYAL
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Shifting paradigms of food security and the impact of trade liberalisation on it
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FOOD SECURITY — Indicators, Measurement, and the Impact of Trade Openness: Edited by Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis, Shabd S. Acharya, Benjamin Davis; Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2, 6 DP. £ 55.
An apt and timely book as global food security today engages the attention of the world as never before. Also a paradox is it that while farmers worldwide produced a record 2.3 billion tonne of grains in 2007 consistent with the trends of world cereal output tripling since 1961, grain stocks are at their lowest levels in three decades and the price spiral remains unabated. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen strikingly stated, “Starvation is a matter of some people not having enough food to eat, and not a matter of there being not enough food to eat.” Evidently, the lack of access to food is a greater problem than availability of food.
As explained in the book, food availability “refers to the physical presence of food” and food access “to the ability to obtain an appropriate and nutritious diet.” In this context, the authors endorse the World Bank’s definition of food security: “Access by all people at all times to sufficient food for an active and healthy life.” It has been further explained that national self-sufficiency should not be confused with food security; in the case of India, though the country had 30 per cent of its grain production in public stock (over 60 million tonne) by 2000, every fourth Indian was reported to be undernourished and food insecure.
Innovations
The volume focuses on some under-researched areas of food security at the national as well as household and individual levels through a collection of studies arising from a two-year project “Hunger and food security” undertaken by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University in collaboration with the Indian Council of Social Science Research and the Food and Agriculture Organisation.
The Millennium Development and World Food Summit Goals of halving the number/share of undernourished by 2015 are fast approaching, but progress towards them is slow. The number fell only by a total of nine million over the last decade, and more worryingly, four million people were added per year in the second part of the decade, wiping out earlier achievements. Recent figures suggest that 815 million people are undernourished (FAO 2004)
The first three of the seven chapters in Part I deal with innovations in the development and use of food security indicators. The rest are primarily empirical, for example dealing with changes in food security during an economic boom in Vietnam, changing regional patterns of under-nutrition and the efficacy of targeted interventions in India, and the intra-household dimensions of food security in Pakistan.
Trade and agriculture
The six chapters in Part II, focusing on the relationship between globalisation, trade and food security, address the impact of one of the main sources of current economic change throughout the world, globalisation, as well as the institutional construct attempting to manage this process of change, the WTO, on food security. Two separate chapters discuss the impact of the WTO on agricultural and food security among the countries of South Asia and the issues for Sub-Saharan Africa.
The liberalisation of trade in agriculture is one of the most contentious issues in WTO negotiations. The final chapter of the volume moves from the rural populace and agricultural sector to supermarkets, an essentially urban phenomenon. While the growth of supermarkets has opened up unprecedented opportunities for some, mostly larger farmers, it has generated negative impacts on small producers who are unable to meet the stringent requirements of supermarket chains and other modern food supply channels.
Global hunger is severe: nearly 30 per cent of the world’s population currently suffers from malnutrition; worldwide some 840 million people are undernourished or chronically food insecure; about 2.8 million children and 300,000 women die annually in developing countries especially so in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. £
Since the World Food Conference of 1974, food security paradigms have shifted from the global and national level to the household and individual level; from a food first to a “livelihood” perspective and from objective indicators to subjective perceptions. The least developed countries are strongly affected by food insecurity and they are also characterised by a generalised level of extreme poverty.
Deprivation
With the advance of agricultural technology, hunger is no longer due to global or national food shortage. Conventional macroeconomic and employment generating state policies in developing countries often bypass certain sections of the society, leaving them deprived of the purchasing power to meet their minimum and desired intake of food.
A particular reference is made to India’s “long and diverse history of development and poverty alleviation in which nutrition-based and wage- employment generating programmes were two of the principal instruments. Self employment generation was a third approach.”
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