Food Security Revisited

We recently posted a short 2-pager on the opportunities and challenges, notably for monitoring of new donor efforts with food security approaches, integrating livelihood as well as nutrition and health. (See Sudhir Wanmali’s Food Security Revisited.)

We asked Sudhir to answer three questions for this blog.

Q- Why is food security becoming fashionable again?

The Global Food Security Initiative was launched at L’Aquila, Italy in 2009 at the G-8 Summit in which the global leaders agreed to reverse the decade long decline in investment in agriculture, and to “do business differently”. Amongst others, this was to be achieved by aligning their efforts with country owned processes and plans, by paying specific attention to immediately tackle the hunger of the most vulnerable, and by initiating medium and long-term sustainable, agricultural, food security, nutrition security, and rural development programs. The United States Government, through USAID, is at the forefront of these global efforts with its Feed the Future Initiative and its Global Health Initiative.

Q- What is the new thinking behind what is happening in food security?

Food security is now being seen by all donor agencies at once as a multi-sectorial, mutli-level, and multi-disciplinary exercise in rural development with a view to enhancing food, nutrition, and livelihood security of vulnerable households in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. It is also being seen as an integral part of the national plans of development with the emphasis of engaging all stakeholders, and strengthening their capacities with a view to sustaining this exercise. Rigorous tracking of its progress, from the beginning, is one of the salient features of this new thinking.

Q- What is the focus of your note?

Having studied issues of agriculture driven rural economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia since 1981, having noted the decline of the idea of agriculture as the “engine of growth” in these two most poor regions of the world during 1995 to 2010, and having witnessed the emergence of this idea again on the center stage of the development agenda of the world recently, the note briefly delineates the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead in understanding, analyzing, and monitoring the intricacies of food, nutrition, and livelihood security, and learning from that experience, in order to make this exercise sustainable and transferable, thereby making the vulnerable rural population of these regions more resilient than what it is today.