Food insecurity demands attention in a hungry, unstable world

The latest data from the United Nations are staggering. In 2019, 821 million people around the world were chronically under nourished, up 10 million from the year before. This means that an astounding 11 per cent of the world's population does not get enough food to eat. Equally concerning is that around two billion of us experience what the UN calls "moderate or severe food insecurity." Taken together, these stats mean hunger is back up to where it was 10 years ago and foreshadows a dangerous world ahead. This is because the primary drivers of rising hunger are economic downturns, the climate crisis, and violent conflict. Regrettably, none of these challenges are expected to lessen anytime soon. Hunger and food insecurity have mostly risen in countries where the economy has been in poor shape. Economic shocks and slowdowns generally mean that people must spend a higher percentage of their salary on food and when they do that, food insecurity rises. Income inequality also drives hunger as countries divided between the haves and have-nots are less able to adapt to economic problems. In many parts of the world, environmental problems also cause economic disruption. The number of extreme climate-related disasters is trending upward, and this not only undermines agriculture's ability to produce food but also the incomes of some of the world's poorest people, many of whom are farmers and depend on agriculture for incomes. For small farmers in Asia, Latin America or Africa, droughts and floods both directly and indirectly hurt food security by reducing the amount of food and people's purchasing power. Finally, there is an almost perfect correlation between conflict and food insecurity in many parts of the world. South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and parts of Nigeria are all affected by conflict and are all at risk of major food insecurity. These factors all interact to create vicious cycles that threaten to send waves of instability crashing across the world. What's especially frustrating is that there is nothing new about any of this. Ten thousand years of agriculture history show a distressing number of situations where the unraveling of food systems, environmental degradation, economic inequality, and conflict all interact. The Syrian Civil War, for instance, seems to have found at least some of its origins in a devastating drought that brought people out of the countryside and into cities where they grew upset over political corruption. There is some evidence that the pathways taken by the Rwandan genocide are related to soil degradation and farmland scarcity. The Arab Spring began as protests over food prices that were themselves triggered by droughts in Russia and China that sent world food prices skyrocketing. And, the French Revolution began when El Niño induced droughts caused crop failures and this helped expose the excesses of the French aristocrat. Luckily, there are things we can do. And Canada can play a global leadership position. Through institutions such as the International Development Research Council and Global Affairs Canada, we can position ourselves as technological leaders and fund the research that will allow us to breed plants and animals that are resistant to extreme weather and capable of remaining productive even under climate change. From the perspective of farm management, we can double down on our record of international development assistance to empower farmers—and particularly female farmers—to adopt management practices that build up the soil and absorb carbon rather than releasing it. This can turn agriculture into part of the solution to the climate crisis rather than a source of the problem. And we can invest in strategies—such as helping low-income families all over the world—gain access to the basic supports they need and thus buffer communities from problems in the global food system. For decades, activists and scientists have tried to make policymakers aware that they need to pay more attention to food systems and climate change. To a large extent, these efforts have fallen on deaf ears. But the evidence is now impossible to ignore. Food insecurity and conflict are inextricably intertwined and both will increase over the next generation unless we develop systems that are resilient, sustainable, equitable and robust. When history books of the 21st-century are written, will the chapter on food security and population growth be a good news story, where we battled back the spectre of famine and conflict? The answer to this question can be yes. And through proactive policy, careful investment in key technologies, and empowering small-scale farmers, Canada can be one of the key global players that helped solve one of the century’s biggest challenges. Evan Fraser is the director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph The Hill Times