Assignment 2: Analysis on Food Security. Business & Marketing Essay

Running head: FOOD SECURITY: NIGERIA & BEYOND1
Food Security: Nigeria & Beyond
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FOOD SECURITY: NIGERIA & BEYOND

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Food Security: Nigeria & Beyond


I. Introduction
Food is essential for human life. For millennia, human communities have devised innovative ways to make food accessible and abundant for all. For one, agriculture was one of humanity’s greatest innovation to make food accessible to growing communities in more systematic ways. This arrangement has worked well for millions spread across sparse lands until mid-20th century. The explosion in population growth, coupled by substantial progress in healthcare, has made accelerated demand more – only so in more unequal ways. The shortage of food supplies has, accordingly, given rise to a longstanding yet mistaken argument about lack of food production and, as a result, malnutrition, famines and potential wars. Despite more innovations in food production, particularly using genetic modifying methods, such argument has long clouded decisions made by policy makers and often mislead public opinion about necessity to increase production. The reality of food security is, however, completely different.
Increasingly, access, not volume, is shown to shape past and current food security challenges. Essentially, food, controlled by governments and producers, has been used, or weaponized, as a means of political and economic control. In so doing, governments, producers and, for that matter, all major upstream players are said to control access to, not production of food, to ensure (or not) food security for all or just specific social/racial groups. To put matters into perspective, current report addresses specific issue related to global food security caused by global population growth and poverty in a given country of choice. Three issues are, specifically addressed: (i) policy issue, i.e. food inaccessibility due to underinvestment in IT innovations, (ii) political issue, i.e. political instability, and (iii) social justice issue, i.e. social equality. The
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selected country is Nigeria. The underlying reasons justifying selecting Nigeria include, primarily, country’s exploding population growth (Africa’s largest); country’s overdependence on oil, as opposed to more diversified economic development; and, not least, country’s chronic political instability (often amounting to outright armed conflicts) and social disparities. This report addresses, accordingly, food inaccessibility due to underinvestment in technological innovations, political instability and social injustice issues caused by global population growth and poverty in Nigeria by introducing more food production innovations and empowering historically marginalized political/social groups.
This report is made up of five sections: (i) Introduction, (ii) Background, (iii) Technologies That Can Reduce Hunger and Improve Food Security, (iv) Specific Factors in Chosen Developing Country: The Case in Nigeria, and (v) Conclusion. II. Background
The question of definition is critical. That is why, a proper definition of food security should be established first before any discussion about what is at stake in or for food security. According to UN Committee on World Food Security, “Food security...means that all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life” (“Food security,” n.d.). This is a working definition for food security. Essentially, food security is, as noted, about accessibility. This is a very important concept which will be revisited repeatedly, particularly upon discussing food security issues in Nigeria.
Having established a working definition for food security, causes of food security are brought forward. Specifically, what role population growth plays in food security. As noted, a
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Malthusian argument has been around for decades emphasizing population growth as one major, if not sole reason for, growing food insecurities, if not shortages and famines. The abundance of food supplies, made possible by innovations in food production methods, has, however, made at least for a while such Malthusian argument irrelevant. In more recent years, food insecurity has emerged again and, paradoxically, population growth has been singled out as one major reason for food insecurity. In reality, however, a growing body of literature on and surveys of food demand ans supply chains show accessibility, not production volumes, to be one major underlying reason for what is seen as increasing food insecurity in several world regions. Specifically, change in Global Hunger Index (GHI) in 2017 and over 1992-2017 vs. Population Growth over 1995-2015 (see Figure 1, Figure 2 and Figure 3) shows that population growth does not lead to food insecurity yet into substantial decrease in hunger levels (Hasell, 2018). In fact,
Contemporary famine scholarship tends to suggest that insufficient aggregate food supply is less important than one might think, and instead emphasizes the role of public policy and violence: in most famines of the 20th and 21st centuries, conflict, political oppression, corruption, or gross economic mismanagement on the part of dictatorships or colonial regimes played a key role. (Hasell)
This makes a powerful case for accessibility as opposed to productivity as a major, if not sole, contributor to food insecurity challenges.
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Figure 1. Global Hunger Index in 2017 vs. Population growth 1992-2015 (UN Population Division). Adapted from Our World in Data, by J. Hasell, 2018, https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth-and-famines
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Figure 2. Change in Global Hunger Index, 1992-2017 vs. Population growth 1992-2015 (UN Population Division). Adapted from Our World in Data, by J. Hasell, 2018, https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth-and-famines
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Figure 3. Change in Global Hunger Index, 1992-2017 vs. Global Hunger Index in 1992. Adapted from Our World in Data, by J. Hasell, 2018, https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth-and-famines
III. Technologies That...