 Food Security Solutions
“Approximately 790 million people in the developing world are still chronically undernourished, almost two-thirds of whom reside in Asia and the Pacific.”
Food security analysis and food security information systems in a world already hungry, and facing global warming which will effect future food security concerns is one of our greatest challenges.
A holsitic plan which takes into account the linkages between poverty and food security factors will be needed in order to generate systematic and comprehensive region- and country-specific analyses. In order to provide a foundational basis upon which food security can be addressed in a sustainable manner, we must first identify the underlying cause and factors that cause unsustainable food production practices in various regions and places of need.
 Women and food security
"Research in Africa, Asia and Latin America has found that improvements in household food security and nutrition are associated with women's access to income and their role in household decisions on expenditure. This is because women tend to spend a significantly higher proportion of their income than men on food for the family."
Solution: provide more access to educational opportunities; see Project Access Point.
 Women and land tenure
"Security of tenure often gives control over decisions such as what crop to grow, what techniques to use, what to consume and what to sell. Given women's tendency to grow food rather than cash crops and to spend income on food, their security of tenure is a key link in the chain from household food production to national food security."
Solution: provide more education, training, and opportunities for women, particularly in the poorest countries.
Local Associations Approach
"In participatory development projects around the world, small farmer groups are intensifying production of food and cash crops, developing small animal husbandry, doing agro-processing and building small scale irrigation systems. They cooperate in bulk purchase of inputs and consumer goods, and group transport and marketing of produce."
Solution: create stronger local cooperatives and provide them access to the global marketplace via Information Technologies, otherwise they will be lost in the wake of globaliztion. See SCALE, Project Access Point, and Paulownia Reforestation Project.
Training
"Training has had a positive impact on farming practices. 'The most important thing we have learned is about agriculture,' said the secretary of a group in Kaoma District, recalling the days when farmers waited until maize plants had grown before adding fertilizer to the soil. 'Once we had to live on cassava towards the end of each season. Now we grow enough maize to see us through.'"
Solution: provide more training to people in communities. See Project Access Point.
Food security and the state
"There are no universally-valid prescriptions determining the precise form and content of state action. But, in the final instance, it is the state that must define the spatial, temporal and sectoral vectors of its intervention by first identifying goals then assessing the most effective strategies for attaining them."
Solution: engage governments through NPO, NGO, and other approriate avenues. See Peoples Peace Plan
 Land Reform
"Land reforms should remove obstacles that discourage or inhibit farmer investment on their land. A comprehensive set of rules and a legal framework, as well as clarification of individual rights, land regularization and land titling, are all seen as important mechanisms to ensure security and encourage producers' investment in the agricultural sector."
Solution: farmers and local community leaders should draw up their own land reform rules and engage their federal representatives in a positive manner that addresses the needs of all sides to achieve the best compromise possible.
Agricultural Research
"Research must provide technologies to maintain the momentum of previous advances and to raise production further. But it must do so while conserving the resources on which agriculture depends and protecting the environment from impacts associated with agricultural intensification. Development of low-cost technologies is essential to increase incomes and employment of rural poor."
Solution: use Information Age technologies to allow rural areas to begin creating wealth from other than "natural resources;" these products include digital music, e-books, educational materials, video's (shoot a Lion video instead of shooting the Lion for his skin,) and the like. See Prosperity Program, and Project Access Point.
Research and extension: a gender perspective
"Neglecting women as agricultural producers and resource managers has weakened sustainable agricultural production. Thus, one key to food security is putting food crops cultivated and consumed by women and their families high on the research agenda. New approaches aimed at involving women in food crops research are emerging in national and international institutions."
Solution: provide more funding via NGO and NPO projects to womens groups and duplicate empirical best practices in more geographical locations of need.
 Women and the Green Revolution
"How the Green Revolution affected rural people depended on whether they were wage earners, cultivators or consumers, came from landed or landless, rich or poor, male or female headed households. However, two general trends are apparent: the wealthy have benefited more than the less well-off and men have benefited more than women."
Solution: provide access to unprejudiced equal markets that care not what gender, geographic location, or sex the participant is. See Prosperity Program.
Education in Food Security
"Globally, investment in both formal education and non-formal agricultural education is declining. FAO figures show that investment in agricultural training, extension and research declined from 9% of total donor agricultural assistance in 1984 to 2% in 1989. If education is to make a significant contribution to sustainable development, it has to be perceived as a long-term investment."
Solution: more education. see Free Digital University
Food security within environmental limits
"Present definitions of economic viability primarily consider productivity and profitability. They do not take into account sustainability. Neither are the costs of harmful effects on the environment included in national accounts used to measure net economic gains and losses. The loss of environmental goods and services is particularly detrimental to poorer countries, whose economies are more dependent on natural resources and are thus more vulnerable to their loss."
Solution: redefine economic viability to include future sustainability as a fundamental criteria of its definition.
Energy and food security in Africa
"Africa must move from the present levels of subsistence energy usage, based on human labour and fuelwood, to a situation where household, services and farming activities use a range of sustainable and diversified energy sources. Obvious benefits are greater resilience in the production system, higher productivity, improved efficiency and higher farmer income. Environmental degradation driven by poverty would be minimized."
Solution: offer a complimentary equal global marketplace where wealth is not dependent entirely on natural resources. See Prosperity Plan, and Access Point.
|
Tweet This -> 
