Food security worldwide: an overview

As discussed in the previous sections, the natural resources of soil and water are vital for growing food for the world population. More than 70% of the food consumed worldwide is sourced from smallholder and family farms. In this regard, the stability of smallholder and family farms signifies the stability of the global food system. Secure livelihoods for smallholders hence translates to food security for the majority of the population. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN defines food security as the condition when “all people, at all times have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” ¹²⁶. In the current times, however, more than 800 million individuals worldwide do not have access to enough food while as about 2 billion people do not have access to the required quality of food, in that they have key micronutrient deficiencies, leading to the phenomenon known as ‘hidden hunger’¹²⁷. Hence 60% of individuals in low incomes countries are categorised as food insecure.

Food security is not an issue of empty stomachs or unhealthy food; lack of access to food, qualitatively and quantitatively, affects the different aspects of human development—physical, emotional, social, and cognitive—and is hence detrimental to the planetary health. All of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) mandated by the United Nations (UN) have a direct or indirect relationship with food security. Hence ensuring food security through sustainable food systems is vital for the overall health of the human civilisation and the natural systems that sustain it¹²⁸.

According to a recent assessment by the FAO, in terms of the Food Insecurity Experience Scale, the percentage of individuals living under general food insecure conditions ranges from 10.8%

in high-income countries to 56.5% in low-income countries. On the other hand, the percentage of people living under severe food insecurity was reported as ranging from 3.1% in high-income countries to 29.5% in low-income countries¹²⁹. The bidirectional relation of the UN SDGs and food security highlight the need to promote sustainable agricultural strategies that aim at minimizing the carbon footprint of agriculture and its impact on natural resources, particularly soil and water, in order to improve food security across societal classes across the world (Perez-Escamilla, 2017). This includes promoting agricultural practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, agriculture being a major contributor of the same, releasing more greenhouse gases than all forms of transportation taken together^130,131. Large scale industrial rice farming and cattle farming are the major contributors here. In addition to this, the application of fertilizers, ostensibly to increase yields for food security, can also lead to pollution of water resources^130,132.

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Furthermore, one-third of all food grown worldwide ends in waste or is lost in the supply chain^131,132. These all factors need to be counted in when framing strategies to alleviate the problems of food insecurity worldwide.

The prediction that food supply needs to double by 2050 to meet the demands of that time and the dependence of worldwide human food narrowing down to a few food crops (with merely 20 plant species comprising 90% of the world's calories) points to the need to improve the food system, both qualitatively as well as quantitatively¹³³. The current system promotes major staple crops that have been bred primarily for intensive agriculture, which are designed to maximise yields with an increase in inputs¹³³. The evolution of organic and agroecological farming practices offers guiding examples of how to improve the productivity of growing food, both qualitatively and quantitatively, while at the same time ensuring care of the ecosystem components like water, soil, and air. Consumers in high-income regions can also play a role in promoting sustainable ways of growing food and thus contribute to the upkeep of planetary health, by altering their choices and food habits and preferring food products that are sourced sustainably^128,134.

The land associated challenges of our times, meaning the challenges in which land management and the way food is grown have a major role to play, can broadly be classified under four themes: climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation, combatting land degradation of various types, and ensuring food security. Perez-Escamilla (2017) referred to them as the ‘land challenges’ and assessed the potential of different land-management practices and their contribution towards meeting the four challenges. Different land challenges are related to each other, in ways that a change in one practice related to a particular challenge can have positive contributions with respect to other challenges, hence necessitating a transformative systems change in the food growing system^135,136. Some of these practices could have cascading effects on solving different land related problems. For example, increased food productivity can one hand reduce food insecurity and on the other hand decrease the demand for land use change, which can in turn lead to conservation of natural vegetation and biodiversity, which can contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation^128,134.

The mitigation potential of increased land productivity, as stated above, is however a function of the methodology employed to achieve that, as a function of crop type, cropping system, fertilizer management, soil management, and soil type^137,138. If the productivity is a result of an increase in agrochemical inputs, it could have adverse effects on the environment. However, if the improvement in agricultural performance is achieved through sustainable means, emissions’

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savings in the range of 13 Gt CO2eq per year could be realized^139,140. The emissions’ savings as a result of non-conversion of grassland to cropland is an added aspect in this regard, given that conversion into croplands leads to an average loss of 36% of soil carbon stocks over a period of 20 years¹⁴¹.

Sustainable intensification also involves the sustainable use of other agricultural inputs like the water used for irrigation. Water management practices in combination with other land management practices, for example soil carbon conservation with cover crops, can improve the soil water retention capacity. Such integrated management practices can lead to an increase in water-use efficiency by 30%, yields by up to 37%, income by up to 40%, and greenhouse gas emissions’ savings by up to 25%. The savings in GHG emission through the reduced energy consumption in irrigation is an added benefit¹⁴². An increase in agricultural productivity can also be achieved through agricultural diversification, which is being promoted as an important land-based climate change adaptation option137,138,143. Crop diversification can not only improve the global food system from a supplies perspective but it can also have a wide range of benefits, which include combatting malnutrition and over-nutrition, in addition to combatting hunger ¹³³. In addition to increasing the socioeconomic resilience of the farmers through income diversification, it can also improve the resilience of crops by suppressing disease transmission and buffering against the effects of extreme weather events¹⁴⁴. This integrated land management and diversification of agriculture is estimated to benefit at least a 1,000 million people, many of whom live from subsistence agriculture and are highly vulnerable to climate change133,134,137,143,145.

In case of smallholder, low-input agriculture, the incorporation of legumes in the cropping system could be a way to diversify agriculture. In addition to providing a high protein diet component, legumes also contribute to the nutrition of crops by fixing atmospheric nitrogen¹³³. This could be ensured through intercropping, cover cropping, or rotational cropping systems.

Recent studies suggest that government and non-government organisations are increasingly favouring such interventions in agricultural diversification^146,147. In this regard, the United Nations declared the year 2016 as the ‘International Year of Pulses’. These initiatives need to be kept up and accelerated with policy support that promotes smallholder farmers as the frontline candidates to feed the world¹³³.

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