Abstract
Food and proper nutrition are crucial inputs into performance and well-being. Many development programmes, projects, and policies therefore include food and nutrition security objectives. Food and nutrition are crucial inputs for the performance of the economy. But the irony is that the present food system is going to be captured by multinational actors with their shrewd politics so that the livelihoods of the most people of the globe are at stake. Amidst this, the rise of a few powerful titans, both economically and politically, is a fearful phenomenon. Such circumstances are not only dangerous for consumers everywhere but also disastrous for poor populations vulnerable to food price fluctuations. Annoyed with the world food system dominated by MNCs, the concept of food sovereignty like La Via Campesina's food sovereignty movement has come to the fore as a protest against the corporate control of the food system. The major objective of the study is to assess food and nutrition security and its link with food politics in a global perspective.
Let us all return to the soil
That lays the corners of its garments
And waits for us.
Life rears itself from her breast,
Flowers blooms from her smiles
Her call is the sweetest music;
Her lap stretches from one corner to the other,
She controls the strings of life. Her warbling waters bring
The murmur of life from all eternity.
Rabindranath Tagore
The food is here but the main problem is distribution. Land is concentrated on very few hands. The big companies pay very little tax. Labour conditions on plantations are appalling. It’s a very classic of how a very productive country with high rates of exclusion, especially among the indigenous population, cannot feed its own people.
------Aida Pesquera, Oxam Director of Guatemala
TopIntroduction
There is no denying the fact that food and nutritionare crucial inputs for well performing of the economy. That is why many food and nutrition security objectives are the concerns of development projects and policies. The concept of food security embraces more than the current nutritional status. But the irony is that food system today is going to be captured by multinational actors with their shrewd politics so that the livelihoods of the most people are at stake. Amidst this, the rise of a few powerful Titans, both economically and politically is a fearful phenomenon. Such circumstances are dangerous for consumers everywhere but disastrous for poor populations vulnerable to food price fluctuations. Monitoring the activities of these corporations is vital for exposing some of the social and environmental impacts on global agriculture; opposition to their activities has fuelled some of the most effective transnational resistance movements contesting neoliberal capitalist globalization. Besides, the pandemic continues to expose weaknesses in the world food system, which threaten the food security and nutrition of millions of people around the world. The world has not been generally progressing either towards ensuring access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food for all people all year round (SDG Target 2.1), or to eradicating all forms of malnutrition (SDG Target 2.2). The COVID-19 pandemic has made the pathway towards SDG2 even steeper. It is estimated that between 720 and 811 million people in the world faced hunger in 2020.Beyond hunger, nearly one in three people in the world (2.37 billion) did not have access to adequate food in 2020 – that is, an increase of almost 320 million people in just one year (FAO, 2021). The number of undernourished people in the world is continuing to rise over the years, thus violating overall the very definition of food security, agreed upon at the 1996 World Food Summit during November,13-17: “ a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” Food insecurity exists when this condition is not met. When we explain the definition, what comes in is that we have failed miserably to deliver sufficient and safe food to millions of people worldwide.
From this definition also, four main multidimensional aspect of food security can be identified:
Key Terms in this Chapter
Nutritional Status: The health of an individual, as measured by indicators directly related food consumption; in children, generally measured by weight for height and skinfold thickness. Nutritional status is generally a function of the ability of households to acquire food, household food acquisition behavior, and the intra-household allocation of food.
Famine: Every famine has its own character and an exact definition is impossible, but the following is a useful definition: Famine refers to a shortage of food or purchasing power that leads directly to excess mortality from starvation or hunger-induced diseases (O’ Grada, 2010 AU39: The citation "Grada, 2010" matches the reference "Gráda, 2010", but an accent or apostrophe is different. , p. 4). Simply, it is a widespread lack of access to food that occurs when drought, flood, or war disrupts the availability of food or income in a society of chronically undernourished people.
Under-Nutrition: This occurs when an individual’s diet is short of calories and/or protein necessary for normal activity. This type of hunger is most common among the poorest populations in the developing world but is not absent either in wealthier countries. Clear indications of under-nutrition are: low birth weights (one in seven live births, 20.5 million babies born globally) were characterized by low birth weight in 2015 ( FAO, 2019 ), high infant mortality rates, low height for age, short for age, thin for height (wasted), and functionally deficient in vitamins and minerals (micronutrient malnutrition). The most extreme forms are exemplified by nutritional conditions known as ‘kwashiorkor’ and ‘marasmus’. The word ‘kwashiorkor’ comes from Ghana and actually means ‘the evil spirit that infects the first child when the second is born’. Marismas may occur in adults or children, but if it occurs within the two years of life, brain development is impaired ( Young, 2012 , p. 37).
Food System: A set of processes that produce agricultural commodities on firms, transform these commodities into food in the marketing sector, and sell the food to consumers in order to satisfy nutrition needs. Today the world food system is dominated by a few major corporate players who enjoy immense power over producers, consumers, national policy-makers and international institutions of global governance and also over the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO. When governments are forced to take a backseat through policies enforced by the organizations such as the WTO, private companies step in and fill the gap. Trade liberalization forces poor countries to remove their import barriers, leaving them vulnerable to ‘dumping’: the process by which commodities that are subsidized in the Global North are off-loaded in large quantities into countries in the Global South, with the target to destroy local sources of food production and distribution, including farmers’ livelihoods. It is not surprising that the last 20 years or more have shown NAFTA to be the key criminal in the systematic destruction of the Mexican people’s all they belong: their standard of living, wealth, livelihoods and economies Following the implementation of a neoliberal doctrine, Indonesia in 1992 opened its doors to food imports, allowing cheap (in other words, heavily subsidized) American soya to flood their market. This destroyed national production of Soya-based tofu and tempeh— known there as ‘meat of the poor’, and today 60 per cent of the soya consumed in Indonesia is imported ( Shiva, 2017 , p. 97). In Mexico now some of the largest food corporations from the Unites States enjoy a significant presence. In large-and medium- sized cities, major supermarkets, discount and convenience stores capture over 55 per cent of the market. The story of Wal-Mart in Mexico is well known since their first venture in 1991 ( www.Walmartstores.com ). In rural places and smaller towns, the food manufacturers have marketed their products through the traditional road side outlets known as “ Tiendas ” ( Hawkes, 2006 , p. 4). As a result this planet is facing a deep and growing crisis. The planet’s well being, people’s health, and societies’ stability are severely threatened by an industrial, globalized agriculture, primarily driven by profit making. Instead, an inefficient, wasteful and non-sustainable mode of food production is pushing the planet, its ecosystems, and its diverse species to the verge of destruction. Food, whose primary purpose is to provide nourishment, has emerged as the leading cause of some of the biggest health problems in the world today: nearly one billion people suffer from hunger and malnutrition, two billions suffer from diseases like obesity and diabetes, and countless suffer from terminal diseases, including cancer, caused by the poisons in our food ( Robin, 2004 ).So instead of remaining a source of nourishment, food has been transformed into a commodity. Since 2007, we have before us 51 food riots in 37 countries including Tunisia, South Africa, Cameroon and India (Adams, 2014 AU41: The in-text citation "Adams, 2014" is not in the reference list. Please correct the citation, add the reference to the list, or delete the citation. ). Today, coming up with an alternative has become imperative for the survival of people like us. Food systems can provide affordable healthy diets that are sustainable and inclusive, and become a powerful driving force towards ending hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all its forms, for all.
Food Policy: The collective efforts of the governments to influence the decision- making environment of food producers, food consumers, and food marketing agents, in order to further social objectives. Food policy analysis poses question how individual nations or the world in general can assure that sufficient quantities of food are available to all people, regardless of their income level, and how food security can be established to avert the chance of famine if the production system is disrupted by a natural and man-made disaster. In posing this question, food policy analysis studies agriculture, food and nutrition and make decisions that affect linkages among these systems ( Karmakar, & Mukhopadhyay, 2014 ).
Under-Nourishment: This measures aspects of food security and exists when energy intake is below the minimum dietary energy requirement, which is the amount of energy needed for light activity and a minimum acceptable weight for attained height (FAO, 2009 AU42: The in-text citation "FAO, 2009" is not in the reference list. Please correct the citation, add the reference to the list, or delete the citation. ). It varies by country and from year to year, depending on the gender and age structure of the population.
Nutrition: The study of the components of food that provides necessary calorie and biochemical requirements in order to sustain life. Nutrition in the broader sense focuses on what type of food consumers need in order to remain healthy and what the determinants to food selections are, including consumer knowledge, home environment, health and incomes. Nutrition also examines the role of feeding programme in protecting the vulnerable groups until their income can be raised for them to purchase their own food.
Food Insecurity: It exists when food people do not have adequate physical, social or economic access to food (FAO, 2009 AU40: The in-text citation "FAO, 2009" is not in the reference list. Please correct the citation, add the reference to the list, or delete the citation. ). A broader look at the extent of food insecurity, beyond hunger, shows, as FAO 2019 states that 17.2 percent of the world population, or 1.3 billion people, have experienced food insecurity.
Bolsa Familia Programme: The Bolsa Familia p rogramme in Brazil was created in October 2003 to improve the efficiency and coherence of the social safety. Main goals were to alleviate short-term poverty and the fight against inter-generational poverty traps. The World Bank articulates that Bolsa Familia programme is such an effective social protection programmes in the world, that it has been able to raise 20 million people out of poverty between 2003 and 2009 as well as reducing income inequality.
Malnutrition: This concept means ‘bad diet’. This is a broad term that refers to all forms of poor nutrition: a state of marked impairment of health caused by inadequate intake of proteins, calories, or specific vitamins or minerals. It is now true that more than half of the countries in the world have made progress on hunger, but the levels of malnutrition have not improved. The case of Peru appears to be an encouraging exception to the rule. With the support of CARE and other organizations from civil society and the donor community, the Peruvian government has generated political momentum to overcome obstacles and create national coordination structures and mechanisms, increase private and public spending on programmers to tackle mal-nutrition and align social programmes with the national nutrition strategy (known as CRECER).