The ability of a country to be food secure depends on many factors. Among these, according to Alyson Warhurst, a professor at the Warwick Business School in England and co-director of Maplecroft (the organization who conducted a recent study on global food security), are poverty, agriculture developments, foreign aid, domestic nutrition policies, and trade.Understanding this, it is no surprise that the United States and other developed European nations are considered the most food secure while their counterparts in Africa, as well Haiti, round out the bottom of the list. One could also likely add domestic stability to the list of factors that affect access to food. Take Angola for instance, “[n]early three decades of civil war [there] has displaced millions and wreaked havoc on agricultural infrastructure,” according to an AFP story in the Ottawa Citizen online.
Conflict, instability, and government corruption help explain food shortages in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Haiti. Other countries at the bottom of the list, like Mozambique, have been effected by natural disasters. Meanwhile, the three most populated countries in South Asia also face “precariousness.” These countries are India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
The risk assessment rankings were put together as part of the Food Security Risk Index. Rankings are determined from a variety of factors that would affect a country’s ability to feed its people. Commodity price in 2007 and 2008 “sparked riots in 30 countries, including many [nations] tottering on the brink of severe shortages or widespread hunger.”
For their part, the World Bank estimates that food inflation from 2007 to 2008 “pushed an additional 100 million people into deep poverty, on top of a billion that were already scraping by on less than a dollar a day.” As world leaders keep pushing towards completing the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round, it is likely that food security will be a topic discussed.
To read the AFP story click here.
Posted: 09/08/09
