Ensuring the availability of food requires that enough food is either produced or imported as components of the national food supply, measured as the Dietary Energy Supply (DES) in terms of Calories available per day for every person in the total population. Achieving national food security is only the first step towards achieving food security. Designing policy frameworks to furnish support for this first step needs to incorporate strategies and measures simultaneously ensuring accessibility of food, whereby all people have access to food in both the quantities and the qualities required to support an active, productive and healthy life. Simultaneous enhancement of availability and accessibility requires consideration be given to examination of the socio-economic aspects of relationships linking the twin pillars of food security and nutritional security.
The Nobel prize winning contributions of Amartya Sen highlight the importance of such linkages. His analysis of famines around the world points out that they occur not because food is not available, but due to non-accessibility to the food. Sen not only analyses the socio-economic factors linking these twin pillars, he calls for the design and implementation of socio-economic policies responding to inadequate linkages, with emphasis to ensuring access to food by people without access, or with insufficient access, to food from home production or on the market. Food-for-work programmes and soup kitchens furnish illustrations as they were designed in response to insufficient employment and income for procuring sufficient qualities and quantities of food. Their design facilitates the linkage of socio-economic factors limiting access to food and, in the process of design, food and nutrition security come to be viewed as intricately linked through both employment and income.
Linking the twin pillars of food security and nutrition security thus implies access of food in sufficient quantities and of appropriate quality at all times to all people for nutritional well-being, but this linkage is yet to be fully achieved in Asia. This section thus introduces some of the major features of policy interventions designed in response to inadequate linkages between access to food of sufficient quantity and nutritional quality.
Achieving sufficient quantity for food security gives emphasis to enhancing the quantity or availability of food. As previously shown (see Table 1), DES figures clearly indicate that even though enough food is available in the world, at least 828 million people in the developing countries continue to experience inadequate access to this food (see Figure 2). The overwhelming majority of people experiencing inadequate access live in developing Asian countries, despite major progress with respect to food availability. This national progress also flows from urban agriculture as a contribution to household food security in many Asian cities. For example, urban farmers link national and household food security to nutrition security by growing up to 50 per cent of the vegetables consumed in Karachi and 85 per cent in Shanghai (WHO 1998).
In contrast to this quantitative focus, nutritional security also highlights the quality of food. Linking these twin pillars thus embraces the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of food supply and consumption and, thereby, achieving nutritional security flows from food security. As a consequence of their intrinsic linkage, nutritional security is not merely linked to availability and access, but also to the appropriate amount and type of nutrients (variety of foods or food groups consumed), as well as the quality and safety of food consumed. Biotechnological processes, particularly genetic modification, is not only important in devising new ways to increase food production, it also contributes to improve nutrient content and storage characteristics and, as such, promises benefits to improved quality of available food.
Food-based approaches are the most effective strategies for overcoming micronutrient deficiencies, but some micronutrients are not always present or available naturally in sufficient amounts. This can be due to lack of iodine in the soil where crops are grown, or in the case of other micronutrients such as iron or vitamin A, due to problems of bioavailability, unbalanced diets or intestinal parasites. Food fortification thus becomes an essential element in nutrition strategies to alleviate micronutrient deficiencies (FAO 1995). Fortification techniques for iodine, iron, and vitamins A, D, C, E and B complex are widely used to enhance food quality.
Food safety is viewed as an essential quality of food. Despite scientific progress, contaminated food (including water) remains a major public health problem. Foodborne diseases are common in many countries, and children are the most frequent victim, experiencing diarrhea leading to underweight and wasting, and unacceptably high levels of child mortality. When unsafe food enters the international market through export trade, the results translate into global actions and substantial losses, arising from the combination of food spoilage, illness and even death, legal actions and trade curtailment, product recall and loss of product credibility.
Hygienic practices in food handling, processing, transport and storage thus have gained importance as consumers depend more on foods produced and processed away from the household. A worldwide initiative on food safety is becoming an indispensable feature of trade liberalisation. Codex Standards, though not binding on Member States, are a point of reference in international law and can provide support for the processing of safe food for sale on the domestic market or as food exports. Their implementation involves ensuring a sound, wholesome product free from adulteration, correctly labeled and presented.
Inadequacies in the national food control system at any or all stages in the production-consumption chain have cumulative contribution to the deterioration of food quality. This results not only in economic losses on the part of industry and government; lost reputation on the part of the producer, but also to social development setbacks for the health and nutrition when the expected impact, in terms of benefits, is not realized. Major obstacles to implementation of adequate food control systems occur when material sourcing, production, packaging, storage, transport conditions and delivery systems are below optimal levels for ensuring food safety. Raw materials of poor and variable quality, processing equipment that is unreliable or poorly fabricated, and inadequate manufacturing and marketing facilities also contribute to poor quality in food products.
Achieving nutritional security means more than overcoming undernutrition and ill-balanced diets. It also requires serious attention to the socio-economic and socio-cultural dimensions of these twin pillars. Successful interventions to enhance Asian prospects flow from efforts to promote the participation of people, traditional diets and integrated rural development, as illustrated by the following examples.
People's participation is increasingly viewed as a major component of effective policy and programme design. It is often recognized an essential feature of technical guidance and resource generation, but socio-economic and socio-cultural factors either limit or contribute to programming efforts in other areas. While there is urgent need for introduction of science and technology, farm households must informed and convinced about their potential benefits for increasing productivity in conjunction with enhancing the quality of life. Changing attitudes and behaviours is necessary support for introduction of any change and, as a result, interventions are only successful if the direct involvement of farm households is ensured. The success of these strategies thus requires the involvement and active participation of the entire rural household, and especially of rural women whose contributions often go unrecognised and whose potential is frequently ignored.
Asian rural women furnish major linkages between the twin pillars of food and nutritional security. In most rural households in Asian countries, women are simultaneously responsible for growing a variety of vegetables, roots and fruits; and for raising small animals, such as chicken, goats, sheep, rabbits and pigs. They are solely responsible for a wide variety of processing activities associated with these food products as well as for milking and the processing of dairy products. Throughout Asia, women are almost exclusively responsible for several important steps in the food and nutrition chain, particularly food processing, preparation and distribution, including cooking and feeding family members at the household level. As a result, women are increasingly recognized as essential to achieving food and nutrition security in households, communities and countries such as China and Thailand (UN/ACC/SCN, 1989). A focus on women is strategically important because they bear children, raise them and largely educate them. Women are also particularly responsible for feeding the family and are in fact gatekeepers of the health and nutrition of the family. This nutritional scenario not only suggests survival of LBW girls as adult women experiencing higher levels of morbidity and mortality, but the likelihood of undernourished pregnant women through premature birth transferring the deficits of undernutrition to another generation of LBW infants and survivors. The potential for this intergenerational cycle of nutritional insecurity is greatest among people living in poverty, and especially in the low income, food deficit countries (LIFDCs), like Bangladesh and Nepal. As suggested by the linkage of maternal undernutrition and mortality to anaemia, this inter-generational cycle of nutritional insecurity not only results from insufficient access to sufficient food, it also flows from micronutrient deficiencies.
The participation of rural women is especially important to the linkage between food security and nutritional security of poor households, communities and nations. These linkages need priority attention in the Low-Income-Food-Deficit countries (LIFDCs), such as Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, People's Democratic Republic of Korea, Lao PDR, Mongolia, Pakistan and the Philippines. These LIFDCs not only have an inadequate food supply to feed their hungry population, but their low income limits their ability to import food make up the deficit. The poorest among the poor in Asian countries are rural women. Promoting and strengthening their involvement ensures a secure food supply and reduces the risk of seasonal food scarcity.
Traditional Diets of rural households often are not only well balanced but also easily adapted to changing nutritional needs. The knowledge of methods for food production and food preparation is part of the socio-cultural contributions of women. Throughout Asian countries, mothers assume major responsibility for teaching daughters about food preferences, practices and nutritional benefits as the food component of the diverse socio-cultural traditions in Asian countries. Research findings highlight the nutritional benefits of traditional methods for processing and preserving foods and, thus, there is a need for strengthening the traditional aspect of Asian diets through the active involvement of women and children, especially girls. For example, the widespread practices of steaming staples wrapped in green leaves and of fermentation processes adds to the value of basic foods (Fleuret and Fleuret 1980). Appropriate technology in the modern tempe industry in Indonesia has contributed effectively to the production of soybean and other legumes to improve the quality of cereal-based diets (Suharto 1997). Traditional processing also involves the drying and smoking of foods such as fish, vegetables, fruit and grains. The application of traditional methods to the preparation of cereal/millet based foods contributes marked improvement in their nutritional benefits (Rajyalakshmi and Geervani 1990). Traditional processing methods such as fermentation and parboiling yielded improvements in the B-complex content (e.g. increases of 50 per cent for thiamin and 36 per cent for niacin) and enhanced availability of vitamins and minerals. Other traditional processing methods like germination, dry-puffing, roasting and fermentation improve protein quality by destroying anti-nutritional factors (Padmashree et. al 1987).
Integrated rural development offers another perspective, which in the context of rural development in Asia, has immense potential for improving the prospects of food security and nutrition security beyond 2000. An integrated approach to rural development embraces food production, processing and dissemination; services such as credit and agricultural advice; and safe storage and marketing practices. Adding people's participation to this approach yields a multi-disciplinary approach to rural development recording immense success in rural communities. As a result of this combination, there is a shift in policy orientation towards the involvement of people, especially of women. Programme development for rural community food farming systems thus combine activities associated production, processing and storage with community participation and nutrition education to facilitate ensuring adequate food and nutrition throughout the year. Integrated rural development strategies investing in human resource development are essential, but these need to be supplemented by intersectoral mechanisms that assist governments with identification of priorities, and that take account, in an Asian context, of the potential for human resources development in agriculture and rural communities. Designing effective policy frameworks linking these twin pillars of food security and nutritional security will flow from examination of the current nutritional scenario.
