المنتدى العالمي المعني بالأمن الغذائي والتغذية

Comments on the Critical, enduring and Emerging Obstacles to FSN

Before we are able to determine that something is a critical obstacle to FSN, it would have had to endure for some time. Otherwise, there is nothing concrete for us to examine and assess its role as critical or not. As for the emerging obstacles, they may vary widely; we will discuss them later on. For the present, we may anticipate some of them in generic terms, but whether they would be critical, enduring or transient obstacles to FSN can only be ascertained with certainty only after they have taken place, hence this change of heading.

Before we talk about the seven items identified as obstacles to FSN, it would be useful to consider what may be reasonably considered to be a serious hindrance to FSN. Nobody could question the obvious fact that world’s food security and nutrition depends on the influences exerted on what generates food and on the appropriateness and the competence with which it is used. Food systems are the tool used for this purpose. Like all tools, they could be well or ill designed which represents their structural suitability to achieve FSN.

Even a sound tool may be put to some inappropriate use. We will expand on this problem later on. Likewise, the finest tool in the world in incompetent hands would not achieve much. Finally, we need to consider apart from food systems and the people who operate and use it, what other physical resources are essential for its operation. These then, constitute the three logically distinct but inseperable dimensions of food security and nutrition:

• Structural suitability of a food system adequately to perform its function; we have purposely represented a food system as a conceptual entity in order to emphasise the vital importance of both our notion of it and the material resources necessary to make it real and operational.

Consider a car, unless we have a correct notion of parts needed to build a car and where and how they are to be fitted together, our effort would not succeed. Then again, we may have the correct notion, but may not be able to obtain the right components or would procure unsuitable ones because someone has persuaded us to do so or for diplomatic reasons. All these would yield poor returns. System thinking, when judiciously used, enables us to distinguish between the conceptual and the material requirements necessary to achieve a given objective.

• People; we all are the end-users of one or more food systems. However, some are also workers/operators of an element in a food system eg., farmers and food transporters.
• Material resources; the critical ecosystem services necessary here include a salubrious climate, an adequate water supply and soil fertility. Next comes seeds, animals, prudent supplementation and the implements and equipment a food system requires.

It is easy to understand that if any one of the foregoing three were to disappear, the question of food security and nutrition would become merely academic. This implies that any adverse influence on any of them is an obstacle to achieving FSN. That presents us with a new challenge; what criteria may we justifiably use to ascertain what is a critical, enduring or an emerging obstacle to FSN.

This is a very serious problem; first, some of the greatest obstacles to FSN would have to be overcome by domains other than food and agriculture. In the ongoing discussion on this forum on “Reducing Inequity and Inequalities in Food Security and Nutrition”, we have dealt with them as the first order causes of inequity and inequalities in FSN. Briefly, current population growth and inter-policy disharmony between food and agriculture and other policies seem to be the most difficult obstacle to FSN we would have to surmount.

Perhaps, it is the awareness of the nature of these two critical problems that has steered this discussion into what we have termed the second order causes of inequity and inequalities in FSN i.e., those causes within the perview of food and agriculture authorities. Even though this restriction would be rather infelicitous to our success, we will try to confine ourselves to those implicit guidelines.

In our previously noted contribution, we have shown that a food system consists of eight sub-systems. In order of their emergence into the real world, they are as follows:

1. The yielder sub-system; when man appeared on earth, this was simply his environment as it is for other living things. Invention of agriculture and/or animal husbandry represent using a part of our environment to produce one or more of selected species. Such a part may vary in size and the types of food produced therein.
2. Harvester sub-system; beginning with hunting and gathering, this sub-system has technically advanced to combined harvesters etc. However, the original mode of hunting and gathering may be still seen among the fishermen and nut gatherers in Amazonas.
3. Culinary sub-system; it involves the preparation and consumption of harvested food. At first, harvested food was consumed on the spot as all the other primates do, and gradually sophisticated food preparation prior to consumption evolved giving birth to culinary traditions.
4. Transport sub-system; its emergence as a component of a food system seems to be contemporaneous with the formation of family groups and dawning of cooking. Greater security and improved taste of food are the motivators of its appearance. One should not overlook the fact that food carried on somebody’s back and in a refrigerated aeroplane are merely technically different but generically identical instances of transport sub-system.
5. Storage sub-system; Even at the hunter-gatherer stage of our evolution, it is conceivable that man occasionally managed to procure more food than could b consumed at once. This enabled our ancestors to store the surplus in some makeshift manner. Soon, humans developed early methods of food preservation like smoking meat and drying seeds, which raised the importance of its storage. Thus, food storage in a hollow of a tree and in a modern refrigerated facility serve the same basic function.
6. Preservation sub-system; this emerged before the invention of agriculture as has been described by many anthropologists. When food was available in abundance, smoking and preserving it in wild honey has been observe in Neolithic cultures. Later on, more advanced methods like salting, converting raw food into other commestables like cheese or preserving it under refrigeration were developed.
7. Supplementation sub-system; need for this appeared after the invention of agriculture, for using a limited part of our environment to cultivate a few species of food plants rapidly depleted the eco-system services in that area as it seriously disturbed the qualitative and and the quantitative equilibria among the living species there. These equilibria are essential for the maintenance of the availability of those services. Their artificial supplementation includes crop rotation, irrigation, use of fertilisers, bio-cides etc. Later on, it was directed at increased food yield by selective breeding, research etc. Thus, the purpose of this sub-system is to increase the food yield by supplementing the available eco-system services ordeveloping improved species or both.
8. Trade sub-system; the last sub-system of our food systems to appear, it represents three distinct orders. The first order food trade emerged with the advent of division of labour in human societies. At first, it consisted of exchanging food for other goods, but when value tokens were invented, food trade involved producers selling their produce for money. The second order food trade appeared when an intermediary purchased food from a producer in order to sell it to an end-user or another intermediary for profit. An intermediary may sell food in any form, for instance, raw preserved or ready-to-eat food. The third order food trade involves a first intermediary purchasing a future harvest at a low price to sell it to a second intermediary at a higher price. Then the latter may sell it to a third intermediary either as a future harvest or as actual produce to be sold. At first limited to the output of yielder sub-systems, trade has now encroached into every sub-system of our food systems with grave consequences for food security and nutrition.

It is difficult to see any other justifiable description of what may constitute a food system. Nobody with the slightest knowledge of human social evolution could deny the primacy of yielder sub-system, that the first six elements of food system were already in place before agriculture was even invented and that the trade sub-system is a recent addition to  our long and enduring use of food systems. We urge the HLPE to disregard any literature or authority that denies the obvious facts of human social evolution and postulates representing some untenable revision of history.

Moreover, it is time the authorities and experts ask themselves the obvious; would anybody with a vestige of intelligence engage in food trade if it already did not have a value? Trader did not create a demand for food. The demand for it arose before trade because after air and water, it is the most essential thing for life. Let our reasoning be firmly anchored to reality, for it is there those who are hungry and ill-nourished await our actions in real time. Thus, the value of food is intrinsic.

Critical obstacle 1.

Therefore, it would be reasonable to single out problems with food systems as a critical obstacle to FSN. However, this problem has three facets:

• The structural suitability of the food system to output a sufficient quantity of food of adequate quality and variety to meet the nutritional needs of its end-users. When it does so, it has been put to its appropriate use.
• If a structurally suitable food system is not used appropriately, that must be rectified as soon as possible. West African pea nut export that led to wide-spread protein malnutrition among children is an example of this. Prior to this export which was carried out on the recommendation of World Bank and IMF to raise national GDP, an ample supply of pea nuts was available to people at a low cost.
• The structure of a food system may become unsound when trade sub-system diverts it away from its proper purpose; this becomes especially pernicious when a yielder sub-system is expanded into already cultivated and unused arable land to produce a cash crop for export. Unfortunately, this is a fairly common occurrence in countries where hunger and malnutrition is prevalent.
• System requirements; Let us begin with the obvious. No yielder sub-system could be established and run where where any one of the three essential eco-system services are absent. They are  a salubrious climate, an adequate water supply and soil fertility. Forstalling any scientistic objections, extensive erection of green-houses would cause such interference with the solar heat exchange between earth and space, it would result in drastic climatic events, not to mention the loss of bio-diversity building those entails.

The other system requirements which are determined with respect to the possibilities of a given area and what is desired as a food system’s output, includes seeds, animals, farm implement, equipment etc. In selecting them, pains should be taken to ensure their appropriateness i.e., that they are the most suitable for the purpose within the competence of their users.

Thus, a combination of flawed food system design and its inappropriate use represents a critical and an enduring obsgtacle to FSN.

Critical obstacle 2.

A sustainable output of the requisite food is a necessary condition for FSN. Assuming that structurally suitable food systems are in place and are put to appropriate use, ensuring their sustainability requires the following:

• Availability of adequate eco-system services which include a salubrious climate, an adequate water supply and soil fertility; if insufficient, prudent supplementation may be used to make up some of the short fall. It must be remembered that excessive supplementation would only exacerbate the problem. Robustness of a food system would increase with its rising ability to produce more while using less than the available eco-system services. Food systems could be pro-active in minimising their use of eco-system services and/or contributing to their replenishment thus:

1. Increased agricultural bio-diversity.
2. As far as possible, choice of food produced is guided by the local food culture.
3. We will not enumerate techniques such as mixed culture, use of green manure and many other ways and means which the reader may easily find elsewhere.
4. Robust and resilient food systems are those which depend on food species that have been used in an area for generations. Extreme care should be exercised when introducing foreign species to a food system. It should always be guided by local nutritional needs and culinary traditions and their impact on the robustness and resilience of the food system involved.

• Unsound structure of food systems; this commonly happens when a Yielder sub-system is made to depend on mono-culture and excessive use of supplementation i.e., use of fertilisers, bio-cides, irrigation etc. Not only does this render food systems rather vulnerable, but they do also result in soil salination and loss of green cover. The Aral Sea disaster and deforestation of Amazonas to raise beef cattle are respective examples of this. Their effect on global eco-system services needs no elaboration.
• Strategic food reserves; it is comparatively seldom we encounter epidemics or pandemics of sufficient virulence to disable a significant number of those who run our food systems. In recent years, nothing was deadlier than Ebola epidemic, but its impact on food production was not great while it was otherwise with the current Corona pandemic. Even though they are more predictable, natural disasters may have an even greater impact on FSN either by destroying crops and animals or by depriving them of some essential eco-system service. 

The sole rational response to such disasters would be to establish a sufficient array of strategic food reserves to ensure an adequate emergency food supply so that all efforts may be directed at restoring the damage to food systems or the health of its operators. As we have noted, third order food sales would present an undesirable stumbling block to the deployment of such reserves.

Therefore, it would be reasonable to regard the use of materials and methods that imperil the sustainability of food systems and failure to establish adequate food reserves as a critical and an enduring thret to FSN. ‘Climate smart’ is a phrase inadequate for our purpose, for it is only one of the three eco-system services necessary for agriculture.

Critical obstacle 3.

• The people; we will first consider the role of workers/operators and then proceed to the end-users.
• Inequity in how the gains from running food systems is shared have grave consequences for FSN. Although not complete, some of the most important aspects of it are given below:

1. Apart from its higher echelons, other workers in food systems are ill paid while in affluent countries, some of them are subsidised by their government. This has already made it difficult to induce the younger generation to replace aging workers. Obviously, this is unfair and unacceptable, hence requires immediate remedial action.
2. The above has been an enduring problem. Its magnitude has escaped the attention of authorities in affluent countries, because the trade sub-system has taken over family farms and small to medium holdings to create highly mechanised industrial farms that employ monoculture and much supplementation. As their consequences are well known, it is imperative to reverse this trend both in affluent and other countries.
3. Inadequate pay has already created an under-class of migrant agriculture workers in many developed countries. While they have to endure insults to their dignity, their absence would make huge food losses with serious results.
4. Meanwhile, this migration of agriculture workers has serious repercussions for the food production in their home countries. Thus, ensuring a decent and an equitable income to all workers in groups I to IV is of critical importance.
5. In less affluent countries, more and more young adults refuse to engage in agricultural pursuits owing to poor pay and the low social status those accord them. This has led to an ever-increasing incidence of child labour in food systems. As the meagre wages of such children often contributes to family income, family-wide malnutrition is unavoidable. An equitable income for workers would help to ameliorate both these social evils.

• Worker’s competence; we need a two-pronged approach to ensure food system workers competence. In affluent countries, educational institutions dedecated to the purpose train their students in  ‘scientific and yield-based agriculture.’ This involves and excessive supplementation and the use of a limited number of food plants and animals. Former is injurious to the environment hence reduces the available eco-system services and the latter makes food systems vulnerable and their outptput more or less unvaried. Thus, end-users are compelled to be satisfied with a possible ample diet with little or no variation. We suggest this trend to be reversed, emphasis on quantity at any cost should be replaced by quality and variety with environmental benignity.

The second prong of our approach is directed at the less affluent countries. According to the available information, family owned and small holdings are the major food producers in many parts of the world. Here, the operator competence assumes a very great importance. Not only it is crucial to ensure and adequate food production, but it is also essential to set up and run sustainable food systems that are put to their appropriate use.

We will not recommend any specific methodology for exclusive use, for what is suitable for any of the first seven sub-systems of a food system could vary widely. This makes specific recommendations not only counter-productive, but also dangerous. Farmers, fishermen and other food gatherers usually have a reasonably good idea of what to grow, when and how much fish they may take, what items are available, where and when it is best to harvest and so on. What is required is appropriate technical training when required; this applies not only to the yielder sub-system, but also to all the others.

However, we will offer a few guidelines for such training with a view to enabling the workers to earn a decent income and to enhance the local FSN:

1. Setting up on-the-job training with every emphasis on the practical and appropriate; young people should be encouraged to join and suitable incentives offered.
2. Encourage and support cooperative food systems including common purchasing units to cut down costs.
3. Link the output of the first seven sub-systems of food systems with worker-owned cooperative sales outlets; these may be food shops, restaurants etc.
4. Whenever such outputs permit, food and agriculture authorities may purchase the excess to establish local food reserves.
5. Discourage the production of ‘ecological food’ so that some intermediary may purchase it at a low price and sell it in nearby cities at a very high price. Sadly, this brand of altruism by ‘educated entrepreneurs’ is becoming common in countries hunger and malnutrition are serious. Better local FSN is far more desirable than a slight improvement in the nutrition of some in a distant urban area.
6. A sustained campaign to increase the public awareness of the importance of food production, the prestige it deserves and culinary enjoyment.

Now to all of us; in affluent countries, we have been remiss at neglecting dietary competence as an important part of our general education. Unless we knew what is appropriate to eat in order to obtain a wholesome, varied and balanced diet necessary for nutrition and culinary enjoyment, where to procure it and how to prepare it for consumption, physical availability and affordability of food would not ensure us an adequate nutrition or culinary pleasure. In fact, it could result in some waste of good food.

In less affluent countries, this is more serious, for targeted promotion of foreign industrial comestibles has made young people reject far more nutritious and suitable local food leading to an increased incidence of NCD’s among them and waste of local produce. This is very serious in urban areas of poor countries where it would be folly to waste any scrap of food. Immediate steps to introduce aggressive dietary education with emphasis on local food culture is highly recommended.

It is obvious flaws in operator training and neglect of public dietary education constitute a critical and enduring obstacle to FSN; we have already mentioned how quantity-intensive agriculture education has rendered food systems vulnerable by using limited number of food species while its inadequacies have reduced the food production in less affluent countries. Universal neglect f dietary education has promoted food waste as well as to a rising incidence of NCD’s.

Enduring problem 1.

• Most authorities and organisations including FAO speak of the trade sub-system of food systems as their most important component. This is patently unjustifiable; inequity in it is responsible for the following problems:

1. Low income of farmers, fishermen and other food gatherers.
2. Increasing difficulty in inducing young people to engage in agricultural pursuits.
3. In affluent countries, the high cost of farmer subsidies.
4. Loss of employment due to family farms and small holdings being taken over by agro-industry.
5. Increased vulnerability of food systems owing to the reduced bio-diversity In yielder sub-systems.
6. Environmental degradation and soil salination due to excessive supplementation to increase yields, hence profit.
7. Food waste; rather than giving a mile long list of references, we would like to invite every interested person to take a look in the dust bin of any big food shop after closing time to see how much food is thrown out. If such items were sold at half price when nearing the ‘best before date,’  many more less affluent people would have been able to afford a better diet. Obviously, this is counter to the spirit of entrepreneurship.
8. Increasing loss of dietary diversity; mono-culture and food monopolies are the main causes of this.

In our contribution mentioned earlier, we have outlined how a sense of proportion and common decency may be introduced into food systems in general and their trade sub-system in particular.

Enduring problem 2.

This problem is concerned with all workers involved in a food system, especially farmers, fishermen and other food gatherers. It has two dimensions; first,  is their land tenure. Food gatherers’ right to collect food from an ancestral area is often flouted by industry and/or commerce, particularly in parts of South America. An analogous problem for the local fishermen is that with or without the connivance of their government, foreign factory ships often exhaust their traditional fishing grounds. The unfairness of this and its impact on the local FSN needs no further comment.

The second aspect of this enduring problem is the failure of the authorities and/or training institutions to increase the relevant competence of those food producers. We do not suggest an academisation of the subject, but rather a solid, practical training. At the same time, the authorities have often failed to establish and support a suitable way for those food producers to acquire suitable tools. Much effort and potential harvests have been lost owing to this.

Extending this to end-users, we find the situation is no better among them. The sad fact is that some decades ago, many countries included some dietary education in schools. Unfortunately, owing to the recommendation of certain pedagogues, it was dropped from school curricula as unnecessary. This is one of the factors that has contributed to improper nutrition in many countries with accompanying child obesity and a rising incidence of NCD’s.

Enduring problem 3.

We will call this the problem of competence allocation, for it is concerned with deploying the relevant capability in the right place. Even though errors here may not be critical, they could have serious consequences for FSN. As technical expertise comes in a wide variety of shapes, shades and relevance, it is necessary to outline a general frame of reference.

Using them in their technical sense, expertise may be needed at the global, regional and local levels. When applied to the world, FAO is a global organisation, WHO has regional offices that include several countries, and at the local level, FAO has its national offices. When we consider the organisations in a country, its national government is ‘global’ for the land and is generally divided into administrative regions while its towns and villages are its local divisions.

Therefore, the primary task at the global level is to design a policy aimed at achieving a well-defined objective eg., FSN and a sound implementation strategy. This calls for an understanding of the full extent of the need a policy is intended to address, and a knowledge of the best generic ways and means of achieving it. It is crucial that such ways and means are generic, for their national implementations are likely to display great variation. This expertise would always strive to facilitate inter-policy harmony.

Seen from a world-wide perspective, expertise required at the regional level would be concerned with adapting the previous implementation strategy so that it may suit the regional conditions. Going to local i.e., national level, further adaptation of a regional strategy may be required to attain the national part of a global effort.

Now we begin to approach the time when a considerable deployment of expertise may be needed. National government would pass on its general implementation strategy to regional authorities. They would adapt it with reference to concrete possibilities and national food needs. For example, it would repay an arid region with a long coastline to concentrate more on fisheries than on agriculture. But what sort of fisheries should be established or expanded ought to be determined by the local workers. Here, specific relevant expertise may be fruitfully deployed.

The secondary function of a global organisation is that of a facilitator. It could provide a variety of suitable material resources and relevant competence at the field level, fisheries in our example. Some may vigorously object to our deployment of most expertise at the field level. But that is where action is, that is where food is produced. This secondary function naturally requires sufficient support personnel.

In our view, most policies are encumbered with an enormous amount of superfluous verbiage. A policy expressed in more than 200 to 300 words is in the danger of becoming a rambling discourse containing logically incoherent elements contributed by a group of individuals with their own vested interests.

Implementation strategies suffer even more of this defect. Should an implementation strategy exceed 600 to 800 words, one may be certain that it is riddled with field activities that do not constitute a strategy. We have seen ‘strategies’ ten to fifteen times this length, most of which described what to be done at the field level. This represents a misplaced use of field expertise at a higher level.

As far as we know, competence to formulate harmonious policies and implementation strategies is hard to come by. It is not the lack of intelligence that causes the problem. So far, policy makers have acted in isolation i.e., concentrating only on their own area without taking into account the consequences of their work on the other policy domains. This has been and still is defended with tooth and claw to uphold ‘institutional autonomy.’ We regret to say the best efforts to change this has been limited to the invention of a redundant phrase ‘thinking in silos’ when reductive thought has been with us for centuries.

Comments on the seven points.

1. Building resilient supply chains for FSN.

Resilience is an attribute of sustainability of a food system. Therefore, one ought to look at what would adversely affect a food system, not at just one attribute of its sustainability. Besides, we cannot see why the phrase ‘supply chain’ is used her as though such a thing could exist independently of the other seven sub-systems of a food system.

2. Urban and peri-urban food systems.

Apart from home gardens, allotment gardens were once common in Berlin, London and Oslo. These were primarily for a single family’s use. Market gardens on the other hand were and are commercial. It is difficult to see why this activity should be considered to be a separate food system that deserves special attention.  We believe the improvements proposed for food systems above can be easily applied to them.

3. Conflicts and the fragility of food systems.

We have covered fragility as man-induced vulnerability, a dimension of sustainability, hence it has already been subsumed earlier. We cannot see how food and agriculture authorities may intervene in conflict resolution as surgical use of force and skilled diplomacy are not within their range and scope.

4. Revitalizing climate policies for FSN.

A salubrious climate is one of the three requirements for sustainability, an adequate water supply and soil fertility are the others. Agriculture could act prudently with respect to all three, but the biggest adverse influence on them come from trade and industry. We have already outlined what contribution food production could make as a component of an integrated action to enhance its sustainability.

5. Recognizing the role and rights of food system workers.

We have used system analysis to place them and end-users as a necessary condition for setting up and using food systems. We have also identified their training and income as critical for FSN.

6. Building a meaningful interface for diverse knowledges and practices for FSN.

Please see enduring obstacle 3 above.

7. Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases challenging FSN.

Food and agriculture authorities can only mitigate this problem by the establishment of strategic food reserves. We have already dealt with this problem as one subsumable under sustainability. We recall a television programme just before Corona pandemic when an ‘expert’ from the most affluent European country publicly ridiculed the idea of such a food reserve. Wrong interface for that expert?

We will conclude our remarks with an observation for the consideration of the panel. Apart from the biological activities of plants and animals involved in agriculture, we believe that everybody would agree on the fact that all human actions in food systems are motivated by an intention. While genetic and environmental factors ‘drive’ the behaviour of those plants and animals, people still have the capacity to decide what to do. Therefore, it ill becomes us to talk about drivers in connection with something man-made like modern food systems which are manned by sentient beings. Let us not turn ourselves into things wittingly or unwittingly. Perhaps, ingrained greed for profit and power  may turn some into driven things.

Best wishes!

Lal Manavado.