Global Patterns and Impacts of Food Insecurity

• High-Income Countries (HICs), often located in the "Global North", consume over 3,000 calories per person daily.
• The UK averages approximately 3,450 calories and maintains high food security by importing 46% of its food, supplementing its own surplus.
• Conversely, Low-Income Countries (LICs) in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia experience heavy deficits and food insecurity.
• Countries like Eritrea (1,590 calories) and Sierra Leone (1,500 calories) suffer from a lack of domestic production and do not have the wealth to afford food imports.

Reasons for Increasing Food Consumption

• Why does an average meat-eater require 2.5 times more land area to feed than a vegetarian?
• Global demand for food is rising rapidly due to two primary drivers: population growth and economic development.
• The global population reached 8 billion in 2022 and is projected to hit 9 billion by 2037.
• This growth is fastest in LICs and Newly Emerging Economies (NEEs), with Africa growing at 2.5% annually compared to Europe's 0.1%, simply creating more mouths to feed.

As countries develop, rising GNI per capita increases disposable income. This wealth triggers a nutrition transition, where diets shift from traditional staples like cereals to meat, dairy, and processed foods.

• In China, economic development caused meat consumption to rise from 12 kg per person in 1980 to 60 kg by 2023.
• Meat production is highly inefficient, requiring a conversion ratio of 7:1 (it takes 7 kg of grain to produce 1 kg of beef).
• Therefore, increased wealth directly increases the demand for grain to be used as animal feed.
• Wealthier populations also demand out-of-season convenience foods, which increases food miles as goods are transported globally.

Factors Affecting Food Supply

• Every time a severe drought hits the Sahel region, millions of crops wither, instantly reducing the continent's food supply.
• Food supply is restricted by a combination of physical (environmental) and human (socio-economic) factors.
• Physical factors include climate extremes, such as Typhoon Haiyan (2013) which destroyed harvests via flooding, and pests like locust swarms or diseases like African Swine Flu.

A critical physical limit is the availability of water. Without it, irrigation is impossible.

• Water stress occurs when availability falls below 1,700 m³ per person per year, whilst water scarcity occurs below 1,000 m³.
• Scarcity is calculated as: $\text{Total Annual Freshwater Resources} \div \text{Total Population}$.
• Poor irrigation attempts can even ruin soil through salinisation, making the land toxic to plants.

Human factors severely limit LICs' ability to adapt to physical challenges.

• Extreme poverty means farmers cannot afford High Yielding Variety (HYV) seeds or fertilisers.
• Conflict heavily disrupts supply; in Yemen, civil war blocked transport routes and forced farmers to abandon land.
• However, human intervention can also boost supply through technology.
• The 1960s Green Revolution increased yields by 40% in India and Bangladesh using HYVs, though modern sustainable solutions in LICs often rely on appropriate technology (like hand-pumps) that is cheap and easy to maintain.

Impacts of Food Insecurity

• Why does this matter? A sudden spike in the cost of wheat does not just mean more expensive bread; it can trigger national revolutions.
• When people face severe food insecurity, the primary consequence is undernutrition, which is linked to 45% of all child deaths globally.
• This causes stunting (low height for age) and wasting (low weight for height, affecting 45 million children under 5).
• In extreme cases, this leads to famine, and diseases of malnutrition like kwashiorkor.
• In South Sudan, conflict-driven shortages have killed 70,000 people.

Food scarcity causes prices to surge, acting as a catalyst for social unrest.

• The UN's Food Price Index (FPI) rose from 127 in 2007 to 201 in 2008.
• These rising prices sparked the 2007 Tortilla Riots in Mexico and the 2011 Arab Spring, which began after a 37% rise in bread prices in Egypt.

Desperation for food also devastates the environment. Farmers are forced to cultivate poor-quality marginal land.

• Farmers skip fallow periods (over-cultivation) and keep too many animals (over-grazing).
• This strips away vegetation, leading to soil erosion as wind and water wash away fertile topsoil.
• In countries like Mali, where 80% work in agriculture, this transforms once-productive land into barren desert—a process known as desertification.

This creates a vicious downward spiral: $\text{Food Insecurity} \rightarrow \text{Use of marginal land} \rightarrow \text{Over-cultivation} \rightarrow \text{Soil erosion} \rightarrow \text{Desertification} \rightarrow \text{Lower food production}$