Food Security in Less Developed Countries, 1970 to 1990

By Craig Jenkins, Stephen J. Scanlan, J. Jenkins. American Sociological Review, 2001

185 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite a global food surplus, almost half of the world's less developed countries suffer significant problems concerning food. Most social science and policy discussions of food security make the “food availability” assumption that increased food supply is the key to reducing hunger. Critics argue, however, that increased food supply has little impact on hunger and that the primary culprits are entrenched inequality and militarism. A lagged panel analysis of food supply and child hunger rates (1970–1990) shows that the food supply has only modest effects on child hunger rates and that food supply is structurally rooted in development processes (domestic investment, urban bias, foreign capital penetration) while child hunger is politically based in arms imports, internal violence and political democratization. Population pressure, tapped by increased age dependency, undermines both the supply of food and the population's access to it, and cultural dualism magnifies the effects of population pressure on child hunger. The effects of economic growth “trickle down” to affect both food supply and child hunger, and economic growth is also positively correlated with political democratization, suggesting there is no short-term “trade-off” between growth, democratization, and social equity.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

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Citations in the corpus

The sustainability and resilience of global water and food systems: Political analysis of the interplay between security, resource scarcity, political systems and global trade (2011, background): “A lagged panel analysis of food supply and child hunger rates (1970–1990) shows that food supply has only a modest effects on child hunger rates (Craig Jenkins and Scanlan, 2001).”
FOOD SECURITY IN NIGERIA: AN OVERVIEW (2012, methodology): “It requires that people have ready access to food (UNDP, 1994:24 also cited in Jenkins and Scanlan, 2001), this is measured using two indicators: (1) food supply is measured as the mean daily per capita supply of calories and protein (FAO 1996) and (2) the child hunger rate is measured by the…”
Does Adaptation to Climate Change Provide Food Security? A Micro-Perspective from Ethiopia (2011, background): “…Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that at lower latitude, in tropical dry areas, crop productivity is expected 1 For a critical discussion of the different dimensions and metrics of food security please refer to Barrett (2010),Gregory,Ingram,and Brklacich (2005), and Jenkins and Scanlan (2001).”
The impact of FDI in land in agriculture in developing countries on host country food security (2018, background): “…capital reduces food security (Wimberley & Bello, 1992; Wimberley, 1991), others suggest a possible increase (Firebaugh & Beck, 1994) or no effect (Jenkins & Scanlan, 2001) and more recently, it has been suggested that this conflicting evidence could be solved by accounting for the sector of the…”
Food Security in the Face of Salinity, Drought, Climate Change, and Population Growth (2016, background): “All four dimensions of food security are negatively impacted by political instability (Jenkins and Scanlan, 2001).”
Reassessing the Effect of Economic Growth on Well-being in Less-developed Countries, 1980–2003 (2007, background): “Some measures, like average caloric intake, might have a stronger socioeconomic gradient (Jenkins and Scanlan 2001).”
When Does Economic Growth Improve Life Satisfaction? Multilevel Analysis of the Roles of Social Trust and Income Inequality in 46 Countries, 1981–2012 (2017, background): “, 2007; Wimberley, 1990; Shen and Williamson, 1997), nutrition and food consumption (e.g. Wimberley and Bello, 1992; Jenkins and Scanlan, 2001), and social well-being (e.”