Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T23:07:21.007Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Challenges to meet: food and nutrition security in the new millennium

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2007

Michael Lipton
Michael Lipton*
Affiliation:
Poverty Research Unit, Sussex University, Falmer, Brighton BN2 1EH, UK
*
Corresponding Author: Professor Michael Lipton, email [email protected]
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Before about 1750 there was no substantial secular fall in protein–energy malnutrition (PEM) over large areas, nor reason to expect it. We have since learned that sufficient economic advance (poverty reduction) plus scientific advance (in medicine and food production) are achievable to eliminate mass PEM. The two advances are linked via increased demand for labour, and hence wages and employment, for those formerly too poor to afford adequate food. The extra employment income arises first from smallholder and employee food production, and later, as labour is released, from a wide range of specialised, increasingly non-farm, production, with employment income traded for food. This process eliminated mass hunger in Europe in 1750–1960. Only by 1975 had PEM in the developing world retreated to (very high) 1936–8 levels, but it fell sharply in Asia and Latin America in 1975–1990, due to unprecedented growth in staples yields, smallholder and farm employment income, and hence the poor's purchasing power over food. However, since 1990, poverty reduction has slowed (before reaching most of Africa), alongside much slower-staples yield growth, increasing water shortages, and big shifts of grain and land from man to farm animals. These trends prefigure declining progress against PEM in coming decades, unless there is renewed, employment-intensive food-staples-yield growth. That process requires reorienting crop biotechnology and water science towards the needs of small tropical farmers and their staple food crops, and shifting land towards them. Mass PEM is indeed largely due to inadequate ‘food entitlements’ by the hungry, but will not be remedied without growth in their employment, based on further advances in food-staples yields per unit land and water. Recent evidence suggests that early PEM may increase lifelong risks of infection and/or degenerative disease. This factor would increase the ‘squeeze’ on health resources in low-income countries, between the diseases of poverty and those of old age. That situation increases the need to readdress PEM by renewed progress in food production and land distribution.

Keywords

Food securityFood staplesUndernutritionOvernutrition
Type
International and Public Health Group Symposium on ‘Nutritional challenges in the new millennium’
Information
Proceedings of the Nutrition Society , Volume 60 , Issue 2 , May 2001 , pp. 203 - 214
Copyright
Copyright © The Nutrition Society 2001

References

References

ACC/SCN (1992). Second Report on the World Nutrition Situation. Geneva: ACC/SCN.Google Scholar
ACC/SCN (1997). Third Report on the World Nutrition Situation. Geneva: ACC/SCN.Google Scholar
ACC/SCN (2000). Fourth Report on the World Nutrition Situation. Geneva: ACC/SCN.Google Scholar
Agarwal, B (1994) A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bagchi, K (1992) Impact of Four Decades of Development on Nutrition and Health Status in India. Rome: FAO.Google Scholar
Barrett, C (1994) On Price Risk and the Inverse Farm Size-Productivity Relationship. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, Department of Agricultural Economics and Economics.Google Scholar
Bhargava, A & Osmani, S (1997) Health and Nutrition in Emerging Asia. Background Paper for Emerging Asia: Changes and Challenges. Manila, Philippines Asian Development Bank.Google Scholar
Bray, F (1986) The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies. Oxford: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chandra, S (1982) Standard of living: Mughal India. In The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 1, pp. 458–471 [Raychaudhuri, T and Habib, I, editors]. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, B (1998) The emerging fertility transition in sub-Saharan Africa. World Development 26, 1431–1461.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coitinho, D, Sichieri, R, et al. (1991). Trends in the Nutritional Status of Brazilian Adults. Sao Paolo, Brazil: University of Sao Paolo.Google Scholar
de Haan, & Lipton, M (2000, misdated 1998) Poverty in emerging Asia: progress, setbacks, and log-jams. Asian Development Review 16, 134–176.Google Scholar
de Onis, M, Monteiro, C, Akré, J & Glugston, G (1993) The worldwide magnitude of protein-energy malnutrition: an overview from the WHO Global Database on Child Growth. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 71, 703–712.Google ScholarPubMed
Drèze, J & Sen, AK (editors) (1997). Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eastwood, R & Lipton, M (1999) The impact of changes in human fertility on poverty. Journal of Development Studies 36, 1–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fogel, R (1997) The Escape from Hunger and Premature Mortality: Europe, America and the Third World, 1700–2100. Ironwood: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Food and Agriculture Organization (1946). World Food Survey. Washington, DC: FAO.Google Scholar
Food and Agriculture Organization (1953). Second World Food Survey. Rome: FAO.Google Scholar
Food and Agriculture Organization (1996) Sixth World Food Survey. Rome: FAO.Google Scholar
Food and Agriculture Organization (2000) FAOSTAT. http://apps.fao.org/Google Scholar
Kirk, D & Pillet, B (1998) Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. Studies in Family Planning 29, 1–22.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lipton, M (1993) Land reform as commenced business: the evidence against stopping. World Development 21, 641–657.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lipton, M (1999) Reviving Global Poverty Reduction: What Role for Genetically Modified Plants? 1999 Sir John Crawford Memorial Lecture. Washington, DC: Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.Google Scholar
Lipton, M, de Haan, A & Darbellay, E (1998) Food security, food consumption patterns and human development. Consumption for Human Development: Background Papers for the 1998 Human Development Report, pp. 45–120: New York: UN Publications.Google Scholar
Lipton, M & Ravillion, M (1995) Poverty and policy. In Handbook of Development Economics, vol. 3B, pp. 2553–2657 [Behrman, J and Srinivasan, TN, editors]. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: North Holland.Google Scholar
Monteiro, C, Benicio, M, Conde, W & Popkin, B (2000) Shifting obesity trends in Brazil. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 54, 342–346.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mroz, T & Popkin, B (1995) Poverty and the economic transition in the Russian Federation. Economic Development and Cultural Change 44, Oct issue.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Payne, P & Lipton, M (1994) How Third World Rural Households Adapt to Dietary Energy Stress: The Evidence and the Issues. Food Policy Review no. 2. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute.Google Scholar
Pinstrup-Andersen, P, Pandya-Lorch, R & Rosegrant, M (1999) World Food Prospects: Critical Issues for the Early Twenty-first Century. Food Policy Report. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute.Google Scholar
Popkin, B (1999) Urbanisation, lifestyle changes and the nutrition transition. World Development 27, 1905–1916.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prentice, AM (1999) Early Nutritional Programming of Human Immunity. Annual Report 1998. Lausanne: Nestlé Foundation.Google Scholar
Ravallion, M (1997) Famines and economics. Journal of Economic Literature 35, 1205–1242.Google Scholar
Sachdev, H (1997) Nutritional status of children and women in India: recent trends. Bulletin of the Nutrition Foundation of India 18, 1–5.Google Scholar
Sen, AK (1981) Poverty and Famines. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Sen, AK (1993) The economics of life and death. Scientific American, May issue, 18–25.Google ScholarPubMed
Shetty, PS (1997) Obesity and physical activity. Bulletin of the Nutrition Foundation of India 18, 2.Google Scholar
Svedberg, P (1999) 841 million undernourished? World Development 27, 2081–2098.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thiesenhusen, WC (editor) (1989). Searching for Agrarian Reform in Latin America. Boston: Unwin Hyman.Google Scholar
UNICEF (1993). Child Malnutrition: Country Profiles. New York, NY: UNICEF.Google Scholar
United Nations (1999). World Population Prospects: The 1998 Revision. New York: United Nations.Google Scholar
Uvin, P (1995) The state of world hunger. In The Hunger Report: Update [Urin, P et al., editors]. Providence: Brown University, Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Programme.Google Scholar
White, L (1962) Mediaeval Technology and Social Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
World Bank (1992). World Development Report 1992. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
World Health Organization (2000) WHO Global Database on Child Growth and Malnutrition. http://www.who.int/ nutgrowthdb/Google Scholar
Yaqub, S (1999) Poverty in Transition Countries: What Picture Emerges from UNDP's National Human Development Reports? Working Paper no. 4. Brighton: Poverty Research Unit, Sussex University.Google Scholar

Appendix Reference

Food and Agriculture Organization (1996). Sixth World Food Survey. Rome: FAO.Google Scholar
Food and Agriculture Organization (2000) The State of Food and Agriculture. Rome: FAO.Google Scholar
Lipton, M, de Haan, A & Darbellay, E (1998) Food security, food consumption patterns and human development. Consumption for Human Development: Background Papers for the 1998 Human Development Report, pp. 45–120. New York: UN Publications.Google Scholar
UNICEF (1993). Child Malnutrition: Country Profiles. New York: UNICEF.Google Scholar