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182. Food (In)Security in Urban Populations
- Author:
- Paul Teng and Margarita Escaler
- Publication Date:
- 08-2010
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies (NTS)
- Abstract:
- Asia Security Initiative Policy Series: Working Papers ii Abstract The food crisis at the end of the last decade and the resulting food riots that occurred in cities all over the world exposed the vulnerability and fragility of the current global food system and highlighted the increasing problem of urban food security. Urban households were among the hardest hit by the food and economic crises as they saw their purchasing power decline drastically. Though aggregate world food availability was relatively good during this period, access to that food by the urban poor had been severely compromised. This working paper aims to analyse the factors that influence urban food security and argues the case for why an urban focus will increasingly matter in the international discourse on food security. A truly “systems approach” will be needed to study and deal with the many inter-related factors and players in food security. Too often have professional communities maintained disciplinary barriers when addressing such complex problems.
- Topic:
- Conflict Prevention, Security, Globalization, and Food
183. Surviving Food Insecurity in North Korea
- Author:
- Diana Park
- Publication Date:
- 09-2010
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
- Institution:
- Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
- Abstract:
- Surveying the ruined landscape thirty kilometers south of Pyongyang, I whispered to my fellow research assistants, asking for my digital camera stored in the van.' s backseat. We needed to keep quiet because our government minders had fallen asleep, allowing us a short opportunity to take pictures of the crop damage, mudslides, and collapsed infrastructure along the next twenty kilometers of the abandoned highway. It grew obvious that North Koreans would face a major food shortage in the upcoming winter.
- Topic:
- Government and Food
- Political Geography:
- North Korea
184. Never an Empty Bowl: Sustaining Food Security in Asia
- Author:
- Dan Glickman and M.S. Swaminathan
- Publication Date:
- 09-2010
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Asia Society
- Abstract:
- Asia's ability to feed itself is of fundamental importance not only to the people living in the region, but also to the world. One of the bright spots over the past half-century has been Asia's capacity to lift many of its citizens out of poverty and ensure that they have plentiful, inexpensive supplies of food, including rice, the region's main staple. But Asia still accounts for about 65% of the world's hungry population, and the historical gains from the Green Revolution are increasingly at risk. Declining trends in agricultural research and rural investment may lead to long-term food supply shortages and increased vulnerability to the famines that used to plague the region.
- Topic:
- Security, Climate Change, Demographics, Poverty, Food, and Famine
- Political Geography:
- Asia
185. Hunger in the Sahel: A permanent emergency? Ensuring the next drought will not cause another humanitarian crisis
- Publication Date:
- 12-2010
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Oxfam Publishing
- Abstract:
- In 2010, more than 10 million people, mainly women and children, were victims of the food crisis in the Sahel. Nearly 500,000 severely malnourished children were taken into care between January and November 2010 in Niger, Chad, Mali and Burkina Faso. Most livestock in the Sahel was decimated. The images and the stories of hunger harked back to the food crisis of 2005 and the famines in 1973-1974 and 1984-1985.
- Topic:
- Agriculture, Human Welfare, Humanitarian Aid, and Food
- Political Geography:
- Africa
186. Globalization and Scarcity: Multilateralism for a world with limits
- Author:
- Alex Evans
- Publication Date:
- 11-2010
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center on International Cooperation
- Abstract:
- Globalization has improved the living standards of hundreds of millions of people – but growing resource scarcity means it risks becoming a victim of its own success. Left unaddressed, scarcity of food, energy, water, land and other key 'natural assets' has the potential to trigger intensifying zero sum competition between states – in the process, increasing poverty, state fragility, economic instability, inflation, and strategic resource competition between major powers.
- Topic:
- Security, Agriculture, Economics, Energy Policy, Environment, Globalization, Natural Resources, Water, and Food
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
187. A Billion Hungry People: Governments and aid agencies must rise to the challenge
- Publication Date:
- 01-2009
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Oxfam Publishing
- Abstract:
- The food price increases of 2007 and 2008 focused attention on a global food crisis that was already affecting more than 850 million people. Even before the 2008 food riots, some 16,000 children were dying every day from hunger-related causes – one every five seconds. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that by the end of 2008, rising prices had added 109 million to the ranks of the hungry. Today, about one in six of the world's population goes short of food, almost a billion people.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Humanitarian Aid, Third World, Foreign Aid, Food, and Famine
188. 4-a-week: Changing food consumption in the UK to benefit people and planet
- Publication Date:
- 03-2009
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Oxfam Publishing
- Abstract:
- Food shopping may seem an innocent, even mundane, chore. But the food we buy every week can have huge impacts on people and environments seemingly worlds away from our regular dash round the shops. The futures of some of the world's poorest people and of the global environment are intimately linked to the contents of our shopping baskets.
- Topic:
- Environment, Political Economy, and Food
- Political Geography:
- United Kingdom and Europe
189. European Food Safety Regulation and the Developing Countries: Regulatory problems and possibilities
- Author:
- Morten Broberg
- Publication Date:
- 06-2009
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Danish Institute for International Studies
- Abstract:
- This paper examines the European Community's food safety regime in order to identify those legal measures that cause the most problems for developing countries' exporters of food products and to point to possible solutions. It is shown that barriers ma y arise due to an array of requirements, some of which may appear to be rather minor legal amendments, such as changing a sampling plan. There is no easy solution to this problem, but three specific measures are proposed: Firstly, improved harmonisation of food safety measures in the industrialised countries. Secondly, when proposing new food safety measures the European Commission should identify the proposal's likely consequences on developing countries – and should explain how alternative measures will affect both food safety and the developing countries. And lastly, the European Community should strengthen its provision of development assistance to enable the developing countries to comply with the food safety standards.
- Topic:
- Agriculture, Development, International Trade and Finance, Third World, and Food
- Political Geography:
- Europe
190. Rice Price Formation in the Short Run and the Long Run
- Author:
- C. Peter Timmer
- Publication Date:
- 05-2009
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- This paper analyzes price formation on the world's rice market using simple supply and demand models as a start, but moving to “supply of storage” models—a staple of commodity-market analysis for more than half a century—to explain hoarding behavior and its subsequent impact on prices. The supply of storage model, however, does not account adequately for the influence that “outside” speculators have on prices. This paper quantifies the impact of financial factors and actors on commodity-price formation using very short-run prices and Granger causality analysis for a wide range of financial and commodity markets, including rice. The results are highly preliminary but are also very provocative. Speculative money seems to surge in and out of commodity markets, strongly linking financial variables with commodity prices during some time periods, but these periods are often short and the relationships disappear for long periods of time. Finally, the paper addresses the long-run (since 1900) relationships among the prices of the three basic cereal staples, rice, wheat and corn (maize), which have declined more than 1 percent per year over the past century. The decline accelerated after the mid-1980s; only the recent run-up in cereal prices in 2007–08 returned them to the long-run downward trend. Despite these common features and important cross-commodity linkages, however, price formation for rice has several unique dimensions worthy of further study.
- Topic:
- Agriculture, Markets, Food, and Financial Crisis