The interconnected challenges for food security from a food regimes perspective: Energy, climate and malconsumption
By C. Sage. 2013
128 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Recent experience of food price volatility in global markets encourages closer examination of the dynamics underlying the global food system and reveals a range of contingent factors. Meanwhile a common thread of many recent expert reports has emphasised the need to intensify agricultural production to double food output by 2050. Drawing upon a food regimes approach, the paper argues that the global food system is vulnerable to three inter-connected challenges that make a largely productivist strategy inappropriate. Analysis suggests that there is a strong likelihood of rising energy costs given the anticipated decline in conventional oil supplies which will have repercussions for land-use and food security. Climate change scenarios anticipate rates of warming and drying in large areas of the tropics that will also have huge implications for food security in those areas. Yet the mode of operation of the global food system is to deliver poor quality nutrition with significant dietary health consequences, a phenomenon labelled malconsumption. The paper argues that these issues are closely inter-related and until we address the fact that the global food system remains dominated by powerful economic interests, an effective solution will remain elusive.
Subfields: Ecology, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b75ead7ebda46310a85a2b80caa16da24328231b
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Citations in the corpus
- Sustainable Food Security: An Emerging Research and Policy Agenda (2014, background): “…demand-led approaches start from the assumption that, since the global food system is unlikely to be able to cope with long-term stress arising from climate change, the vital task is to enhance the adaptive capacity (i.e. resilience) of local and regional food systems (Marsden, 2012; Sage, 2013).”
- The transition movement and food sovereignty: From local resilience to global engagement in food system transformation (2014, unknown): “Climate change and peak oil provide two closely interconnected challenges for our environmental futures and demonstrate, for example, the complex interlocking of food, land and energy markets (McMichael, 2013; Sage, 2012a, 2013).”
- The new geography of food security: exploring the potential of urban food strategies [Keynote Speaker] (2014, methodology): “In current debates, this model has been incorporated into wider access-based approaches that focus on issues of food distribution (Sage 2013) and emphasize the role of traditional knowledge and endogenous development strategies in addressing food insecurity (IAASTAD 2009; Marsden 2013).”