How are climate actions evaluated? A review of United Nations food security evaluations

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 100509
Author(s):  
Steven Lam ◽  
Warren Dodd ◽  
Lea Berrang-Ford ◽  
James Ford ◽  
Kelly Skinner ◽  
...  
Author(s):  
Scott McLean ◽  
Lavinia Gasperini ◽  
Stephen Rudgard

<P class=abstract>This article introduces the work of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and describes its interest in the application of distance learning strategies pertinent to the challenges of food security and rural development around the world. The article briefly reviews pertinent examples of distance learning, both from the experience of FAO and elsewhere, and summarises a complex debate about the potential of distance learning in developing countries. The paper elaborates five practical suggestions for applying distance learning strategies to the challenges of food security and rural development. The purpose of publishing this article is both to disseminate our ideas about distance learning to interested professional and scholarly audiences around the world, and to seek feedback from those audiences.</P>


Author(s):  
Vergina CHIRITESCU ◽  
Iudith IPATE ◽  
Camelia GAVRILESCU ◽  
Mihaela KRUSZLICIKA ◽  
Mariana SANDU ◽  
...  

In any national economy, agriculture is one of the key sectors of economic activity overall. As always anthropogenic activities held in conjunction and, not infrequently, the adversarial relationship with the environment, agriculture accumulate elements of society, from food security to social stability. In this context, one of the objectives of long-term agricultural development strategy must be accounted for to ensure food security threshold. This paper aims to study the scientific endeavor further the current concepts of food security and the challenges facing countries in this regard. Every day, the world's population grows by about 220,000 people and the world population every year we add 80 million people. All these people must have access to sufficient and safe food. Globalization of the food chain causes constant new challenges and risks to health and interests of consumers. This article was prepared as a basic research as sources of information: the international literature, FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization - United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization) data, official statistics etc. According to FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization - United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization), food security means “guaranteeing each individual at all times, in any place or time of access to adequate and healthy diet to allow him to have a regime sufficient food for a healthy and active life”. Multidimensional nature of food security, just as the fight against poverty, calls a good correlation between the various sectors - agriculture, commerce, infrastructure, health - and the variety of intervention levels - local, national, international. In recent years indicate that there are problems of food insecurity in 86 countries, 43 African, 24 Asian, 9 in Latin America and the Caribbean, 7 in Oceania and Europe 3. In 2004, 35 countries have received emergency aid because of the food crisis. The main causes were: military and civil conflicts, post-conflict situations, refugees, economic disadvantaged areas and climate issues. Global agricultural production should increase by at least 3% per year to provide live feed of the rising population, according to a study by the Economist Intelligence Unit. At present, current agricultural productivity growth is only 2%. In the present research work, we demonstrated that food security is a global problem of humanity, in the context of population growth, climate change and economic crisis. The food security is influenced by four groups of factors, namely: the social - economic and political, agro-food sector performance, social protection and health and hygiene.


Author(s):  
Hester L. Furey

“Food security” is a term that came into use in the second half of the 20th century as government leaders and nongovernmental organizations began to apply systemic thought to global issues of availability of food, the safety and nutritional sufficiency of available food, and the stability of individuals’ access to it. Hunger and starvation as global problems began to be studied at the end of World War II. Concerns about global food supply management prompted the establishment of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and increasing levels of policymaking and intervention, enacted through a series of conferences and culminating in a World Food Summit in 1996. Although world food production increased by 50% in the decades following WWII and the 1990s were believed to be a “golden age” of food security, the United Nations believes that before the 2020 world health crisis some 815 million people experienced chronic hunger. Spikes in unemployment such as those associated with the 2008 world financial crisis and the 2020 coronavirus pandemic cause accompanying increases in food insecurity. Global climate change continually challenges efforts to address food-related crises, and at the same time rising numbers of refugees add to the numbers of people who would be food insecure even if all other conditions were optimal. Awareness of the special role of gender within this field has only begun to develop since the first decade of the 21st century. Although the field of food studies is older, most academic studies of food focus on histories of specific commodities, regional folkways, and/or food and literature. Systemic studies of food policy outcomes have not examined gender as a vector of knowledge until about 2010. Consequently, this more specialized field of knowledge remains in an early stage of development, with activists at the forefront more often than academics. Considerable pushback has emerged against the idea that experts should educate locals about food, and many food activists now argue that education should arise from those in production rather than those who create policy. Women represent 60% of all people living with hunger and food insecurity. They also make up at least 60% of agricultural workers. Most of these women growing food are feeding families and regions rather than aspiring to be participants in global economies. As women they experience food insecurity because of cultural gender biases, and as farmers they are twice disadvantaged because neither agriculture nor women’s production within families tends to garner widespread respect or wealth. Gender-blindness has plagued efforts to resolve these issues even when the UN and others have placed women’s progress at the forefront of millennium goals. Organizations charged with analysis of poverty and hunger still operate using out-of-date analytical tools that themselves perpetuate sexist discrimination. “Global” does not necessarily mean more progressive or inclusive. Despite the discourse of goodwill, in practice the unquestioned dominance of WWII-era paradigms of large-scale agricultural production and food supply chains has limited rather than supported collective ability to effect change. In the final years of the 20th century, a growing number of alternative voices such as the anti-globalist scholar Vandana Shiva and fair trade and sustainability groups like Café Campesino began to introduce dissenting ideas about food security using the terminology of food sovereignty and biodiversity, tying these concepts to the empowerment of women, local communities, and “eaters.”


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 85-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Jacques ◽  
Rafaella Lobo

To better understand how regimes select norms and how sustainability concepts are used and change, we conduct a quantitative content analysis of important documents specifically related to a critical Earth system, the “World Ocean.” Using the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization’s State of the World’s Fisheries and Aquaculture reports from 1995 to 2016, we find that economic norms have always been dominant, and the use of sustainability concepts has become increasingly growth oriented. Discourses of restraint, relevant to principles of sustainability, are virtually absent. Growth is the central driving concern for the World Ocean Regime, a noncodified, economistic regime that governs the oceans. We conclude that the norms of sustainability have been selected for fitness with the neoliberal political–economic order and a totalizing ideology of growth, and that sustainability concepts are used as a mask to legitimize extractivist goals that are actually not sustainable.


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