By Alaa Murabit, Sustainable Development Goal Global Advocate, UN High-Level Commissioner for Health Employment and Economic Growth, and MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow
The United Nations has recently provided statistics on hunger and food insecurity—one in nine people in the world are undernourished—and if that number doesn’t seem significant enough, it’s nearly 800 million people worldwide do not have enough food. Poor nutrition is responsible for the deaths of close to half of children under the age of five—which equates to over three million deaths per year.
The World Health Organization defines food security as the means that people have to access safe, sufficient, and nutritious food—and to remain healthy and lead an active lifestyle. And when people don’t know when their next meal is coming from, issues like civil unrest and political conflict are more likely to occur.
Global food security is now one the biggest challenges the international community faces—and in the coming decades, food and nutrition security are threatened by increasing levels of volatility in financial, energy, and agriculture markets. The causes of these issues are myriad—climate change, political conflict, national agricultural policies are just some of the variables that can contribute to unstable food and nutrition security.
Amidst the backdrop of developing trends like climate change, migration, and urbanization, food insecurity can increase the risk of political conflict, prolong civil unrest, and threaten democratic governance. At the same time, poor governance and absence of the rule of law exacerbate issues surrounding the equitable distribution of resources—particularly for historically unstable, resource-limited regions in need of agriculture investment and financing.
The global community needs to realize that is pretty much impossible to address such complicated and nuanced problems like national security, political conflict, or stability issues without first addressing food security.
Given this reality, food security planning must be better understood both concerning global trade and cross-sector convergences, and leaders should endeavor to contend with this volatility as the new context within which we must feed the world. Intersecting factors not usually associated with food affordability and accessibility drive volatility in global food markets, exacerbating food insecurity.
Food security will be an increasingly critical security priority for global leaders in the coming decades. International coordination to improve financing systems for humanitarian aid requires public and private sector leaders that can build resilient food systems in the context of an increasingly interdependent and volatile global landscape.
The “new standard” of intersecting and unpredictable factors influencing food markets creates new challenges and questions for global leaders. Do we understand the underlying factors that cause volatility in agricultural markets? Why do we continue to fail to deliver nutritious and needed foodstuffs to the communities and regions that need it most? These are the important questions for public and private sector leaders, and food security experts to address in the coming years.
Access to nutritious food is a basic human right. As such, governments are tasked with the responsibility of ensuring this—but when the government fails in its duty to deliver, what options are available? In Kenya, rising food prices and food insecurity stem from farmers using cheap quality fertilizers and inadequate training programs for new farmers. Even though farming accounts for about a quarter of Kenya's GDP, unusual weather, low crop yields, and the high cost of inputs have plagued their food system. Things like counterfeit seeds and cultivars are things that the government should regulate and seek to reduce. States should strive to provide the necessary infrastructure and control to support the private sector.
These situations cry out for private sector intervention—a scenario where the agility and ability of an organization to quickly overhaul and improve the status of a problem is critical. Private sector entities can often “launch, execute and adapt to programs faster—and usually for cheaper long-term costs than governments can,” said Forrest Ball, a consultant at the Washington DC-based firm, The Lewin Group.
The global food chain has many vested interests; from high-level agricultural ministries down to the small, rural farmers—myriad issues can influence successful food delivery and food security. The UN is looking to the private sector with more regularity and more frequency to meet the demands of the global community. Their partnerships with private sector entities help secure and implement a broad range of projects that can reach more people in less time. The private sector allows stakeholders to get involved in addressing investment, global agribusiness and rural upstarts, which can create new cooperatives and networks between government and smallholder actors, like farmers. The alignment of global food security must involve public and private actors.
This will enable nations to meet both demands on the food system and emergency humanitarian crises into the long-term, achieved by sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and food availability.
But governments need to be careful not to allow private firms to take over completely—negatively impacting the environment or decreasing current standards should not come at the cost of speed and program implementation. Rather, nations need to provide the right structures and incentives to allow private firms to flourish and operate in the spaces where they can do the most good, without disrupting the local population.
International coordination for food security must be heightened and national-level silos broken down; long-term food delivery and sustainability depends on it. It is a moral imperative to food security to millions at the community and national level and to develop both sustainable, robust and equitable frameworks that truly achieve food security in the coming decades.
Alaa Murabit is one of 17 Sustainable Development Goal Global Advocates, a UN High-Level Commissioner for Health Employment and Economic Growth, TED speaker and MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow. She was recently named a 2017 “Forbes 30 Under 30” for her work in global health policy.