Food Security最新文献

Tension is building up between the need to provide food for eight billion humans and the necessity to safeguard their environment. In many parts of the world, the ongoing transition of farmers’ livelihoods is creating even greater uncertainty in addressing the dual challenges of food security and environmental sustainability. Using a simulation-based approach, this study develops an operational framework to explore ways to reconcile rice production and environmental costs from the perspective of the heterogeneity of farmers’ individual characteristics, farmland transfer strategies, and grain production. Using data from land-use images as well as farming household, plot, and farmland quality surveys, we tested our study framework in Taojiang County, Hunan Province, southern China. The results demonstrate that under the combined influence of rural livelihood transitions and targeted rice subsidies, cultivated land in Taojiang County has rapidly concentrated in large-scale farmers over the past decade. This concentration has resulted in higher levels of carbon emissions and water pollution while stabilizing the local supply of grain. Our findings suggest that to reduce the environmental costs of grain production during rural livelihood transitions, policymakers should develop robust policy instruments to encourage medium-scale cultivation patterns while guiding large-scale farmers optimize their inputs. In addition, more support should be provided to smaller-scale, environmentally friendly production patterns.

Abstract

Small-scale aquaculture is a major source of food in Myanmar. Beyond its importance for food security and nutrition, small-scale aquaculture contributes to the livelihoods of many rural households and is a potentially valuable strategy for rural development. However, small-scale aquaculture producers have limited access to improved production technologies and information, which hampers the productivity and socioeconomic performance of small-scale aquaculture systems. In this study we assessed the impact of the adoption of better management practices and exposure to nutrition-sensitive training by 379 small-scale aquaculture producers in the Sagaing and Shan regions of Myanmar. We focused on whether and how the exposure to these interventions affected household food security through improvements in productivity and livelihoods. We used Propensity Score Matching to compare the performance of groups that were exposed to the intervention for one or two years, for seven impact variables. Exposure to the intervention had a positive effect for most impact variables, with differentiated effects among variables, group comparisons and regions. In terms of food security, beneficiaries had significantly higher dietary diversity (measured as the Food Consumption Score, FCS), but there were no significant differences for fish self-consumption (measured in kg/week). Longer exposure to the interventions produced significantly higher positive effects across most impact variables for the 2-year beneficiaries compared to 1-year beneficiaries and control groups. Our study suggests that the length of exposure to such interventions can be important in mediating the actual impact of small-scale aquaculture systems on household food security and livelihoods. Sustained help to small-scale producers should be considered in initiatives and development projects seeking to enhance the food security and rural development of small-scale aquaculture systems in Myanmar, and beyond.

Two plant production-based strategies – biofortification and dietary diversification – have been advocated to overcome micronutrient deficiencies, which are major contributors to morbidity and mortality worldwide. The respective benefits and effectiveness of these two strategies are the subject of controversy. Expanding the scope of this debate beyond the sole nutritional outcomes, and using a food system approach, this interdisciplinary review aims to providing a novel and holistic perspective on the ongoing debate. The literature shows that biofortification can be an effective medium-term strategy to tackle nutritional risk in vulnerable populations in some contexts, but that it also may have negative environmental, economic, and social impacts. Dietary diversification, on the other hand, is known to be a sustainable way to overcome micronutrient deficiencies, bringing with it long-term benefits, including nutritional, and beyond, the provision of ecosystem services. Dietary diversification is however challenging to implement, with benefits that are not immediate. Biodiversity as a basis of human diets is critically important to improving both human and environmental health. Diet diversification through increased mobilisation of biodiversity in food systems deserves much more attention and support in policies for food and nutrition in low- and middle-income countries.

Adaptive strategies that build resilience within food systems are urgently needed to address food supply chain disturbances. Increasingly severe and compounding natural disasters, conflict and the Covid-19 pandemic have led to recurrent food shortages, price spikes and increased food inequities in recent years, threatening food security. ‘Regional food systems’ (RFSs), that aim to scale up local food production and increase consumer access to food, present many opportunities for adaptive social and ecological developments. However, appreciation of food system resilience at the regional scale remains fragmented, therefore this research aimed to develop a cohesive synopsis of how resilience is conceptualised and enabled within RFSs. A systematic literature review of 688 articles identified 53 of relevance. Analysis revealed 3 ‘core constructs’ with 15 associated ‘key themes’. A total of 130 ‘regional food system resilience’ strategies were synthesised from the literature, along with their documented challenges, opportunities and recommendations. Findings revealed that RFS resilience strategies rely on: 1) robust supply chain networks and relationships that feature implicit and explicit values; and 2) access to infrastructure that supports scaling up. Strategic planning and policy-enabled infrastructure and network development will strengthen RFS resilience, and food policy councils are key facilitators of these developments. Greater policy integration related to land use is needed to ensure farmers can access productive agricultural land now and into the future. This research contributes to a greater understanding of how resilience can be optimised at the regional scale and support decision-making to address food security for acute disasters and long-term climatic changes.

Child undernutrition is highly prevalent around the world, particularly in low-income countries where economies are largely driven by the agricultural sector. Agricultural policies have the potential to impact total food production as well as food quality and diversity, thereby shaping nutritional status. In this study, we first corroborate evidence that Malawi’s Farm Input Subsidy Program (FISP), which provides subsidized vouchers for farm inputs to targeted rural households, boosts child nutritional status. Our analysis includes recent years during which the program’s nutrition impacts have not been previously examined. We then investigate three broad categories of agriculture-child nutrition linkages in the context of this program: (1) farm production and diversity, (2) crop sales, non-farm enterprises, and food consumption from different sources (purchases and own production), and (3) women’s empowerment and the health environment. In order to identify plausibly causal estimates, we employ a fixed effects-instrumental variable (FE-IV) approach. Our results demonstrate that FISP is associated with an increase in use of agricultural inputs (fertilizer) and boosts crop production. In addition, there are positive impacts on the likelihood that households sell maize, the crop targeted specifically by the program, and operate non-farm enterprises. Recipient households also purchase more vegetables on the market and consume more cereals from the crops they produce themselves. The evidence from this study highlights the main pathways through which an agricultural policy shapes short-term hunger and child nutritional outcomes.

Small-scale farmers make up the majority of farmers worldwide yet experience particularly high rates of food insecurity. A growing body of literature explores pathways to food and nutrition security among small-scale farmers but has yet to reach consensus on the most effective pathways (e.g., crop specialization for market sale versus on-farm crop diversification for home consumption) to improve livelihoods. Using structural equation modelling (SEM) based on data drawn from the 2015/16 Uganda National Panel Survey, this study considers how farm and household characteristics including gender, age, education, farm size, region, and off-farm income relate to market engagement (farm sales, market purchases) and on-farm crop diversity (Simpson’s diversity). We then further examine how market engagement and on-farm crop diversity relate to household livelihood outcomes including dietary diversity and food security (number of food secure months). Findings suggest that both higher levels of market engagement and on-farm crop diversity are associated with increased dietary diversity. Higher levels of crop diversity—whether for market sale or for self-consumption—are strongly associated with improved food security. Market engagement is positively associated with increased dietary diversity, and this association is particularly strong for market purchases. Together, these findings highlight the potential for both market-based strategies and on-farm crop diversity to contribute to food security goals in Uganda, providing further evidence that these strategies can be complementary.

Unhealthy diets are among the main risk factors associated with non-communicable diseases (NCDs). In Sub Saharan Africa, NCDs were responsible for 37% of deaths in 2019, rising from 24% in 2000. There is an increasing emphasis on health-harming industrial foods, such as ultra-processed foods (UPFs), in driving the incidence of diet-related NCDs. However, there is a methodological gap in food systems research to adequately account for the processes and actors that shape UPFs consumption across the different domains of the food systems framework and macro-meso-micro levels of analysis. This paper interrogates how the Food Systems Framework for Improved Nutrition (HLPE in Nutrition and food systems. A report by the high level panel of experts on food security and nutrition of the committee on world food security, 2017), considered the dominant framework to analyse nutrition, and language of interdisciplinarity are practised in research with regards to consumption of UPFs among adolescents in Ghana, a population group that is often at the forefront of dramatic shifts in diets and lifestyles. We conducted a scoping review of studies published between 2010 and February 2022, retrieved 25 studies, and mapped the findings against the domains and analysis levels of the Food Systems Framework for Improved Nutrition (HLPE in Nutrition and food systems. A report by the high level panel of experts on food security and nutrition of the committee on world food security, 2017). Our study illustrates that there is a tendency to address unhealthy diets among adolescents in a siloed manner, and as a behavioural and nutritional issue. In most cases, the analyses fail to show how domains of the food systems framework are connected and do not account for linkages across different levels of analysis. Methodologically, there is a quantitative bias. From the policy point of view, there is a disconnect between national food policies and food governance (i.e., trade and regulations) and initiatives and measures specifically targeted at adolescent’s food environments and the drivers of UPFs consumption.

In-kind food transfers are widely used in many developing countries to address food insecurity, yet undernutrition remains a key problem. In this paper, we combine nationally representative administrative and household survey data from Indonesia, to evaluate whether the replacement of means-tested in-kind food transfers (Rastra program which delivered staple cereal rice) by a food voucher system (BPNT program) changed the consumption behaviour of the poor. Our analyses show that the BPNT program increased dietary diversity among poor households, by at least 15 percentage points relative to those households that still received in-kind food transfers. Further, the new initiative has also improved the consumption of essential nutrients by poor households and the targeting performance of social welfare programs. Our results highlight the importance of social protection reform and show that changing such in-kind programs to vouchers provide poor households with greater flexibility to choose the foods of their choice.