Why Food Security Is a Question of Environmental and Social Justice

Access to adequate food is considered a basic human right. Yet, despite a global surplus of food, millions of people worldwide are facing chronic hunger. How is this possible? From environmental and socioeconomic shocks to our current food system, food insecurity is caused by an interplay of factors. Finding ways to increase global food security is therefore a question of social as much as environmental justice.

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According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), food security is achieved when “all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.”

Currently, one-tenth of the world’s population experiences food insecurity, with over 780 million people worldwide estimated to suffer chronic hunger, a number that has grown steadily over the past ten years. Around one-third of those affected have so little food that their lives and livelihoods are in immediate danger.

Malnutrition rates become even more worrying in view of the growing world population, predicted to reach 10 billion by 2050. In order to meet demand, the UN predicts that food production will need to increase by 70% compared to 2009. Already now, however, food security is compromised by a variety of factors, many of which are bound to be exacerbated in the years to come. 

Let us take a look at the biggest threats to global food security and how their negative impact can be diminished.

More on the topic: What Is Global Food Security and Why it Matters

The Climate Crisis and Our Food System

In theory, we produce more than enough food to feed the entire world population. Over the last decades, food production has become ever more expansive and efficient and the amount of food grown worldwide has increased dramatically. So why do more and more people go hungry nonetheless? 

Food Waste

One major contributor to the problem is food waste. An estimated 30% of food produced worldwide goes to waste. It is lost either on its way from harvest to retail or later on, in our households, supermarkets, and restaurants. Altogether, the food wasted amounts to a quantity sufficient to feed around 1.26 billion hungry people. 

Awareness of this problem has increased in recent years and various projects aiming to fight food waste have sprung up. This includes community projects like food rescue and sharing initiatives and public fridges as well as campaigns encouraging consumers to be more mindful of avoiding food waste. Start-ups like Too Good To Go help both retailers and food service providers sell left-over food at a reduced price. Even technological approaches are being tested. In Saudi Arabia, for example, a hydroponic agriculture model aims to reduce the country’s reliance on imported foods and save resources by making it possible to produce fruit and vegetables according to demand, thereby reducing supply chain waste. In Asia, a new scheme turns wasted or spoiled crops into sellable food ingredients. 

Beyond its economic and social repercussions, the environmental impact of food waste makes it an even more urgent problem to solve. Food waste contributes significantly to the gigantic environmental footprint of our diets – another significant contributor to food insecurity. According to a 2021 report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), food waste is responsible for up to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, exacerbating the environmental impact of our already resource-intensive diets.

Resource-Intensive Diets

While food production will have to increase significantly in order to feed the growing world population, something will have to change as the way we produce food is already pushing the planet’s limits. Half of the world’s vegetative land is being used for agricultural production and food production accounts for 90% of deforestation and around a third of all carbon emissions. This makes our food system a primary driver of climate change and biodiversity loss. Simply intensifying agricultural production, using even more land and scaling up emissions, simply isn’t a feasible solution to increase food security.

Rather, we need to look at what we eat. In the past decades, our diets have become increasingly resource-intensive, largely due to an increased intake of animal protein, especially meat. A growing availability of a great variety of food has made diets around the world increasingly uniform, so that the traditionally western diet is now the standard diet for most of the world population. This has repercussions for the planet, since the production of animal origin foods is far more resource-intensive than that of plant-based foods. 

The majority of land used for agriculture serves the livestock industry. Producing one calorie or gram protein of beef or lamb requires around 100 times as much land as is needed for plant-based alternatives. Animal foods are the most resource-intensive and the emissions associated with their production is significantly higher than most plant-based foods – largely due to their land requirements. Beef, lamb and mutton top the rankings. 

In total, emissions from livestock & fisheries account for over a third of total food emissions. Similarly, meat and dairy alone – while providing only 18% of globally consumed calories – are estimated to be responsible for up to 40% of agricultural water use. Beef is also the primary cause of global deforestation, making it a major driver of biodiversity loss.

The production of animal products and beef and dairy in particular is thus highly inefficient and puts an enormous strain on the planet. Nonetheless, consumption and production of animal protein remains on the rise, especially in Asian countries. Shifting this trend by moving towards a more plant-focussed diet represents an opportunity to increase the share of food produced for direct human consumption, ensuring a fairer allocation of resources. 

Consider this: today, less than half of the world’s cereals and a mere 7% of soy produced are eaten by humans. The rest are used as animal feed or for oil production. Scaling down on animal agriculture thus provides an avenue to feed more people while using fewer natural resources, thereby increasing food security and social justice. 

Research projects that a global shift to a largely vegan diet could free up to 75% of agricultural land. Even foregoing an entirely plant-based diet, the amount of agricultural land used could be reduced significantly by cutting the consumption of beef, mutton, and dairy. Such a shift would also substantially decrease the negative impacts of our food system on the planet. It would also contribute to social justice not only by increasing global food security but also by reducing the burden of climate change on vulnerable populations.

Beyond the content of our diets, production methods contribute to the significant greenhouse gas emissions of our food. To meet demand, farming techniques are becoming intensive to produce as much food as possible as quickly and at the lowest cost possible. This, however, takes a toll on animals and the planet: aggressive fertilizers degrade the natural environment further, livestock are crammed together in far too small spaces. 

All this goes to show that, if our planet’s resources are to be preserved and food security ensured in a sustainable way, what we eat as well as how we produce it must change. 

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The Climate Crisis and Environmental Shocks

The climate crisis impacts weather patterns and increases the likelihood of extreme weather events, be it persistent heat, rainfall, fires, hurricanes, or droughts. The weather becomes less predictable and whole harvests are lost, making farming increasingly difficult. Ironically, the environmental shocks that compromise food security are made more likely by our food system and its enormous environmental impact.

According to the UN, natural disasters occur more than three times as much today than they used to in the 1970s and 1980s. The agricultural sector suffers from these shocks more than any other and the impacts are especially brutal in lesser developed countries. Droughts negatively impact the quality and the productivity of crop yields and livestock, and are responsible for over a third of production loss. Lost crop and livestock production put at risk the livelihoods of those reliant on the harvest for income.

While extreme weather events cannot be eliminated entirely, the only way to keep their likelihood from increasing further is to slow global warming, which requires action from all actors and across all sectors. 

External Shocks

Events like wars and other social and economic crises pose another considerable, and largely unpredictable, risk to global food security. Most recent examples are the war in Ukraine and the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to disruptions in the food chain, comprising food availability and thus contributing to increased food insecurity and hunger.

In the case of the pandemic, lockdowns and travel restrictions weakened the economy, thereby exacerbating inequality across the world further. Once again, people in developing countries were affected disproportionately, and the number of those suffering from food insecurity spiked to almost double the number of the previous year. 

Similarly, armed conflicts like the current war in Ukraine impact food supply far beyond the regions where they take place. As war takes hold on the country and its population, harvesting takes a backseat, leading first to food shortages in the country and then to the halting of exports. In the case of Ukraine, the war especially affected the availability of wheat – which accounts for around a fifth of calories consumed worldwide, barley, and corn. As a consequence, global wheat and barley prices rose. 

According to World Vision, global food and energy supplies disruptions resulting from the conflict in Ukraine increased hunger risks for one-fifth of the global population — around 1.7 billion people.

More on the topic: Battling the Ukrainian Wheat Crisis: Why the Global Food Supply Is Ripe for Change

Reducing Hunger and Injustice 

We are in the midst of an acute hunger crisis. Hunger is a human rights issue, and as the interplay of factors contributing to its prevalence demonstrates, taking action against it is a question of social and environmental justice. 

Like many current challenges, increasing food security goes hand in hand with mitigating climate change. A less resource-intensive food system would contribute to a fairer and more efficient use of natural resources, making it possible to feed more people while simultaneously reducing the environmental damage caused by food production.

At the same time, it is necessary to acknowledge that certain changes in the climate, such as increased occurrence of extreme weather events and changing weather patterns, require urgent adaptation strategies. Similarly, external shocks such as the Covid-19 pandemic or armed conflicts can be unforeseeable and require ad-hoc adaptation. If we create a more sustainable and diversified food system that honors our planet’s boundaries, minimizing food waste and environmental impact, there is great potential to significantly improve food security.