المنتدى العالمي المعني بالأمن الغذائي والتغذية

There are many key contributions in here and I have collaborated with a broader collective of scholars to offer a synthesis of detailed comments. Here I would like to focus on one key theory that could be useful for revisions.

I will start with Figure 11, which addresses an important question regarding the determinants of food insecurity. However, much is missing. What about access to land, income/poverty, and assets/wealth? It strikes me that an exchange entitlements and capabilities framework would be useful here. I find this figure to be misleading and recommend changing it.

The focus on reviewing the best evidence to date regarding the determinants of food and nutritional security in different contexts is key, and I it is excellent to see colleagues engaging this challenge. Along these lines, I was surprised to see that Amaryta Sen is only cited a couple of times starting on page 67, and then briefly referenced in lines 27 to 30 on page 68. These lines are useful in the way that they address several of the frequently cited driving causes of food and nutritional insecurity (e.g., income, conflict, and inequality at multiple scales (e.g. gender or racial inequality) etc.” If the reader skims the figures, they will miss the broader interpretation and discussion in this subsequent part.

It could be useful to continue developing from Sen’s scholarship after the 1981 famine paper to think about the different types of entitlements (e.g.,, production, trade, income-based, and transfer / gift entitlements) (Sen, 1987) relevant to the determination of food security and vulnerability to increasingly frequent hazards (Sen and Dreze, 1989; Devereux et al., 2018; Watts and Bohle, 1993; ).

Devereux, S., Vaitla, B., Swan, S.H., 2008. Seasons of Hunger: Fighting Cycles of Quiet Starvation Among the World’s Rural Poor. Pluto Press.

Watts, M.J., Bohle, H.G., 1993. The space of vulnerability: the causal structure of

hunger and famine. Progress in Human Geography 17 (1) 43–67.

Sen, A., Dreze, J., 1989. Hunger and Public Action. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Sen, 1987. Hunger and entitlements. World Institute for Development Economics Research. United Nations University.