SECURITY

KEY TRENDS
PRESENTED BY
GROUP FIVE
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By mid – century, the world’s total population is India and China, for example, are the fastest
set to reach over 9 billion doubling the demand growing countries in the Asian region.
for food, feed, and fiber (FAO, 2009)
The demographic trends in Asia have serious
The increase of demands for food comes from
implications for food systems in the region and
developing countries is Asia and Africa.
elsewhere.

As the youth move from the rural areas to urban areas
to look for better livelihoods, there are fewer people of
working age left behind to produce the growing
quantities of food required to meet rising demand in
urban areas.
The mass movement of people from rural to urban has
also been accompanied by a rapid and ongoing
expansion of cities and slums in parts of Asia.
3
By 2030, urban populations and the number of slum
dwellers in Africa and Asia are set to double.
Slums are characterized by lack of access to clean
drinking water, inadequate sanitation and waste
disposal mechanism, making resident population highly
vulnerable to quick- spreading diseases and chronic
food insecurity. (CISS, 2013)
• As incomes in developing countries continue to grow, more and more people are able
to access food in greater quantities.
• Initial increases in food consumption may pertain to the intake of higher quantities of
key staples – cereals.
• There is a substitution phase in which the cereals are replaced by more energy-rich
foods such as meat and those with a high concentration of vegetable oils and sugar
(Godfrey et al., 2010: 2770)
• Global consumption of meat increased by around 62 per cent between 1963 and 2005.
The consumption of meat in the developing countries grew threefold during this period.
• Much of the growth of meat consumption took place in Asia in general and in China in
particular (Kearney, 2010:2796)
• However, not all developing countries have experienced this phenomenon of nutrition
transition equally.
• In India, for example, the consumption of meat continue to lag behind when compared
to Brazil and China for people at similar income levels.
• The overall demand for grains for direct and indirect consumption through animal
products continues to expand.
• In China, the increasing conversion of land for intensive mono-cropping of soybeans
and maize for animal feed over the decades had caused immense pollution of waterways
by pesticides and fertilizers, declines in biodiversity, the destruction of natural carbon
sinks and rising greenhouse gas emissions (Schneider, 2011)
 The global surge in bio-fuel production was
4
01 triggered in 2004 – 2005.

It happened when the United States and the

European Union adopted a number of policies and
02 incentives to boost bio – fuel consumption.

Biofuels are seen to be significant in reducing

03 dependence o fossil fuels in a number of
countries around the globe.
Biofuel production – and policies that encourage
04
and support it – has become highly controversial
in the context of global food security.
05 First generation biofuels are produced from
plant starch, oils and animal fats and sugars.

06 Bio – ethanol, for example, is produced from food crops such as

sugarcane, maize, wheat, sugar beets and sweet sorghum, and is
currently the most widely used form of biofuel.
 • The United States and Brazil are the world’s
5
largest bioethanol producing countries.
06
• Largest quantities of biodiesel, which is made
from edible oils, come from Germany, France,
07 United States and Italy (Naylor et al., 2007)
• Jean Ziegler (2007:2), the UN special
Rapporteur on the right to food, stated that
08
the sudden, ill-conceived, rush to convert food
into fuels is a recipe for disaster.
09 • The IMF highlighted that biofuels were responsible
for almost half the increase in the total
consumption of key food crops in 2006 – 2007.
10
• In Asia, a large number of small farmers in countries like
Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Nepal continue to
suffer from weak access to land and tenure insecurity, in the
wider context of weak governance institutions, poor law
enforcement, and endemic corruption.

Climate change affects all four dimensions
of food security, food availability, food
accessibility, food utilization and food
systems stability.
Agriculture is highly – sensitive to climate
and food production is affected directly by
variations in agro – ecological conditions
for growing crops (Devereux and Maxwell,
2001; Fischer et al., 2002; Kurukulasuriya
and Rosenthal, 2003)
6
Overall studies show that the impacts
of climate change will be mixed and
uneven across regions (IPCC, 2007).
In the next four decades or so,
average global temperature will rise
by 2 – 3 degrees Celsius (Stern,
2006:56)