IDST 1000Y Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Millennium Development Goals, Women Grow, Food Security
15 Dec 2016
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IDST: Food and Hunger: An Irresistible Force – 26th November, 2014
• Women grow 60-80% of the world’s food, but only own 2% of the land
• ¾ of the world’s poverty is located in the countryside – those who grow the food
are the hungriest
• Root causes of rural poverty center around the terms and conditions by which
people farm
• World Bank’s 3 rural worlds – agriculture-based countries (agriculture most
important source of economic growth, countryside is where the bulk of poverty is
found), transforming countries (agriculture is not the driver of economic growth,
but the countryside is where most poor people live), urbanized countries
(agriculture is not the driver of growth, and poverty is urban – not rural)
• The WB sees this as linear growth – one occurs before the other
• Agricultural extensification – bring more land into food production – extending
cultivated area (the WB believes that this is what occurred before the 19th
century)
• Intensification – increasing the amount of food produced on a given plot of land –
more skilled labour, fertilizers, technologies, higher-yielding varieties of plants,
etc.
• The state tried to intervene in agriculture, but then withdrew because of neo-
liberalism
• Does the world produce enough food?
• Famine according to the UN: when 30% of children are acutely malnourished,
20% have no access to food at all
• Millennium development goal number 1 was that by 2015 there should be ½ the
number of hungry in the world there where is 1990
• Numbers of malnourished in the world has been coming down steadily for the
last 25 years
• 842 million people in the world are hungry (last year’s estimate)
• The number of poor people in the world does not equal the level of hungry as you
can be poor and still have enough to eat
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
• 90% of the drop over 25 years is accounted for by China and Vietnam – as such,
what is happening elsewhere?
• The estimates are based upon the amount of food you need in a year to have a
sedentary (sitting and not doing a lot) lifestyle
• If the numbers are adjusted to reflect an active lifestyle, the number of hungry in
the world becomes 1.33 billion – which hasn’t changed in 40 years
• Increase in global food prices has pushed millions back into poverty
• Food security – access by all people, at all times, to enough safe and nutritious
food for an active and healthy life (has to be culturally appropriate)
• Food insecurity – too many people do not have access to enough safe, nutritious,
culturally appropriate food
• Food self-sufficiency – when you produce enough food for yourself, household,
community, country, etc.
• Chronic hunger – when people do not have enough food
• Famine – a situation in which chronic hunger is so severe that the number of
people who die is higher than the number who would be expected to die
• Mass famine in the 20th-21st century are politically driven, not because of a lack
of hunger
• Food availability decline (FAD) – when the population grows faster than the
resources needed to support it – food grows arithmetically, population
geometrically
• Some believe FAD must occur in order to restore balance
• The power of population is superior (Malthus)
• Over the last50 years, the per person food production has gone up
• We currently produce more food/person than we ever did
• Increasingly the problem of health in the world isn’t related to poverty, but instead
on the overweight, obese people
• This is another form of malnourishment
• New high-yielding seeds were distributed to poor people – became known as the
‘Green Revolution’
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
