Every year, prior to World Food Day (October 16), the United Nations releases The State of Food Security and Nutrition In The World. Among the key messages of the most recent (2018) issue are that, for the third year in a row, rising numbers of people in the world (now 821 million) suffer “undernourishment” – a common proxy for ‘hunger’ – and that recent years have seen limited progress in addressing others forms of malnutrition, ranging from child stunting to micronutrient (i.e., mineral and vitamin) deficiencies. Billions of people are at risk of food insecurity by these broader measures, mainly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This recent period reverses the steady progress made for decades, and has sparked concerns high-level discussions among public and private sector leaders worldwide, especially given the Sustainable Development Goal of zero hunger by 2030.
The prevailing definition of “food security”, globally agreed upon at the 1996 World Food Summit, is “a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” An important implication of this definition is that food security is intrinsically unobservable, a latent variable. Measurement challenges therefore abound (Barrett 2010; Upton et al. 2016). But drawing on this definition, food security is now commonly conceptualized as resting on four pillars: availability, access, utilization, and stability.
Availability refers to the supply-side condition; without adequate quantity, quality and variety of food available, there will necessarily be food insecurity, no matter the allocation mechanism a society employs. Despite widespread dire predictions in the 1960s and early 1970s of looming mass famine due to population and income growth, the growth of food supplies has far outpaced growth in demand over the past century. During the most rapid period of food supply growth – the so-called “Green Revolution” period of the mid-1960s through early 1980s – the global per capita availability of calories and protein surpassed the volume needed to satisfy every living person’s daily intake requirements. By the 1980s, the fundamental challenge had therefore shifted from food production to distribution.
Robust supply growth from the end of World War II through the end of the century led to sharp declines in real food prices globally and huge improvements in nutritional indicators, especially in LMICs. This induced complacency among public sector leaders, who sharply slowed investment in agricultural research and development from the 1980s – except in Brazil, China and India – which predictably led to (lagged) deceleration of food supply growth. Demand growth due to the combination of population and income growth plus urbanization began outpacing supply expansion around the turn of the millennium. The all-time low in the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ (FAO) real food price index was in December 1999. Today, real food prices are 58% higher than they were 20 years ago, albeit down 23% from the modern high point in December 2010 (see accompanying figure).
The price consequences of changing agricultural productivity growth directly leads to the second food security pillar, access, which reflects demand side considerations. Access relates to individual consumers’ budget sets as defined primarily by income – earned or unearned (e.g., through government or informal transfer programs) – and prices. Do individuals’ and households’ budget constraints allow them to reliably access a healthy and safe diet, given other necessary expenditures (e.g., on housing, health care)? If not, they lack adequate access to food. The access pillar reflects the powerful insight of the opening sentences of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen’s seminal volume, Poverty and Famines: “starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat. While the latter can be a cause of the former, it is but one of many possible causes” (Sen 1981:1, emphasis in original).
The third pillar, utilization, refers to how the food to which one has access combines with other inputs to the health production function – e.g., (clean?) water, parental caregiving, hygiene, storage and food preparation practices, current health status – to determine an individual’s nutrient and toxin intake, and thus the health and well-being impacts of food consumption. Considerable recent work in development economics, nutritional sciences, and public health has focused on these issues.
The fourth and final pillar, stability, introduces stochastic dynamic considerations. In the face of stochastic incomes, prices, do consumers face excessive exposure to risk of inadequate diets? Does that uninsured risk exposure, or perhaps the psychological burden of coping with such consequences, distort the behaviors of the food insecure, perhaps trapping them in long-term poverty (Barrett et al. 2019)?
The links between food security and Catholic Social Teaching (CST) are thus self-evident. CST emphasizes humankind’s intrinsically social and sacred nature. We are one body with our brothers and sisters, all created in the image of God, and obliged to acknowledge and serve the Christ in one another. An offense to any one of God’s children is an offense to God (Matthew 25). All CST flows from celebration of the inherent dignity of every individual. The prevailing definition of food security similarly rests on a foundational respect for human dignity.
The Church, expressly directed by Christ to ‘feed my sheep’ (John 21:17), has long advocated for a fundamental human right to food. In the modern era, this dates at least to Pope Leo XIII: “It is a most sacred law of nature that a father should provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten” (Rerum Novarum, no. 13). Article 25 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights later enshrined the right to food, putting legal weight behind CST, although many governments have been slow to fully respect that right through food assistance programs (FAPs).
The bedrock CST principle of solidarity – and the related preferential option for the poor – compels FAPs, and motivates economists to consider the most efficient and cost-effective means of honoring the sacred right to food. A great deal of careful economics research has gone into the design of effective FAPs worldwide, which now serve more than 1.5 billion people directly (Alderman et al. 2018). But even the largest FAPs are dwarfed by the commercial food distribution system that serves the communities in which beneficiaries live. So it matters enormously whether FAPs reinforce or undercut commercial food value chains in providing healthy, affordable food.
This leads directly to the CST principle of subsidiarity, the idea that issues should be addressed at the lowest level possible, honoring individual human dignity and free will, while still internalizing all important externalities. As Saint (then-Pope) John Paul II emphasized in the encyclical Centesimus Annus, CST is wholly consistent with the dramatic market-oriented reforms of the 1970s-90s that dramatically transformed the agri-food sector in much of Africa, Asia, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union. Farmers’ rights over their land, water, seed, and product, consumers’ right of dietary choice, all favor decentralized market mechanisms for the production and distribution of food, framed within regulatory structures that efficiently safeguard food safety, reduce asymmetric information through grades and standards. But John Paul II also emphasized the need to underpin markets with solidarity manifest in FAPS and other social safety net measures to ensure food (and other forms of) assistance to those who otherwise lack access to an adequate diet.
Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ emphasizes the inextricability of care for the natural environment – ‘our common home’ – from solidarity with with poor, that environmental issues are social justice issues. The inextricable links between care for the natural environment and for the poor perhaps finds their most natural expression in agriculture, the sector of the economy that employs a majority of the world’s poor and consumes more than 70% of the globe’s freshwater and soil resources. Because food availability, utilization, and stability depend so fundamentally on the state of the natural environment – e.g., of crops, pathogens, soils, water – care for creation is essential if we are to care for the poor.
Finally, it is worth noting that food insecurity is increasingly concentrated in areas of extreme poverty exposed to violence, underscoring one further principle of CST: peace. According to UN data, over past two decades, conflict-affected countries’ share of stunted children grew from 46% to 79%, and the world now struggles to care for a record 69 million forcibly displaced people, with hunger and conflict the primary drivers of forced migration.
Chris Barrett
Stephen B. & Janice G. Ashley Professor
of Applied Economics and Management
Cornell University
References
Alderman, Harold, Ugo Gentilini and Ruslan Yemtsov, eds. (2018) The 1.5 Billion People Question: Food, Vouchers, or Cash Transfers? World Bank.
Barrett, Christopher B. (2010). “Measuring Food Insecurity,” Science 327, 5967: 825-828.
Barrett, Christopher B., Michael R. Carter and Jean-Paul Chavas, eds. (2019) The Economics of Poverty Traps. University of Chicago Press and National Bureau of Economic Research.
Sen, Amartya (1982). Poverty and famines: an essay on entitlement and deprivation. Oxford University Press.
Upton, Joanna B., Jennifer Denno Cissé and Christopher B. Barrett (2016). “Food Security As Resilience: Reconciling definition and measurement” Agricultural Economics 47, S1: 135–147.
