Achieving food security is increasingly about getting food systems to function right. The concept, which cuts through all 17 of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), has evolved in recent years, along with policies and programmes needed to attain it by 2030.

Technological, institutional, governance, capacity, and policy solutions to achieve them on multiple levels require local action beyond single disciplines, and the input of professionals from different spheres. This is according to the editors of the recently published Handbook on Public Policy and Food Security, Prof Sheryl Hendriks, recently appointed director of the Natural Resource Institute of the University of Greenwich, and Prof Suresh Babu, an extraordinary professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development at the University of Pretoria (UP) and a senior research fellow and head of capacity strengthening at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in the USA.

Prof Suresh Babu	Prof Sheryl Hendriks

                                     
According to Prof Babu, who has been associated with UP for many years, work on the book started in the early 2020s, when Prof Hendriks was still head of the UP Department of Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development and director of the Institute for Food, Nutrition and Well-being at UP.

In the preface to the 460-page hardback handbook, the two academics explain how they recognised an “urgent need to bring the current developments together in the form of a handbook that can serve as a strand textbook and reference materials for those involved in the fight against food insecurity, hunger and malnutrition”, which continually threatens close to a billion people in developing countries, and is further complicated by the increased levels of obesity and micronutrient malnutrition.

“Current disciplinary approaches are narrowly focused on the 17 SDGs, but how the SDGs are framed requires the integration of approaches to understanding how advancing all 17 goals can lead to a more food-secure world. This book addresses a gap in available material, offering multiple disciplines insight into food security analysis across the goals,” they explained.

To move beyond agricultural economics towards a food systems approach, they included the multidisciplinary views of experts from universities across the globe (including the University of Pretoria), and institutions of the likes of the IFPRI, International Food Policy Research Institute, Oxfam, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN, the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) and the International Water Management Institute.

They say that public policy about food security and development should be seen in terms of six elements: availability, access, utilisation, stability, agency, and sustainability.

“Food security is not static, but constantly in flux. The depth and severity can change over the short and long term. Therefore, it is best to understand the state of food insecurity as a situation along a continuum of experiences that can change at short notice – either improving (becoming more food secure) or deteriorating (becoming more food insecure),” Prof Hendriks and Prof Babu write in one of the 40 chapters.

The direct and indirect impacts on national, local, and household food security of shocks such as COVID-19, conflict and climate change are perplexing to policymakers.

A chapter that looks at food systems in terms of the sustainability agenda highlights that perhaps “the separate trajectories of development and sustainable policies and the lack of a cadre of professionals able to think not only in the box (discipline), outside of the box (beyond their discipline) but without a box (not constrained by discipline boundaries), has deprived millions in developing countries of the realisation of the inalienable right to be free from hunger and malnutrition.”

Prof Babu says that the SDG goals are admirable, but the necessary policy and implementation need to be of real practical value for the world as a whole to move faster towards reaching them.

“We’ve seen how the policy system of many countries has not fully absorbed the goals, and how the institutions that were supposed to internalise these goals were not doing it fully, or set their own priorities and goal tracking systems. Local capacity is not available everywhere. We need to develop this,” he adds.

He believes better economic, educational and energy policies are, for instance, needed in especially developing countries to solve the so-called “food-fuel puzzle”. It sees people (and women in particular) struggle to balance their time on household chores such as collecting fuel for cooking and heating purposes and agricultural production with considerations for their health and well-being and the environment. It sees households having to make many choices and trade-offs to survive, with issues such as the impact of indoor air pollution and deforestation, as a consequence, being put on the back burner.

A chapter he co-authored with Prof Shailendra Gajanan, a professor in Economics at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford in the USA, for instance, points out that more people in Sub-Saharan Africa than in any other region of the world depend on fuelwood and charcoal as a source of fuel, especially for cooking purposes. This dependency is set to grow in future. To combat increasing issues surrounding this, they advocate for introducing adequate policies around subsidies and their effective execution and education programmes to provide people in the region with greater access to more modern cookstoves, such as ones powered by liquified petroleum gas. This has proven successful in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Kenya and Ethiopia.

“The food-fuel debate is an aspect that resonates across all communities, and the dilemma highlights the urgency of governments for quick and immediate top-down action,” they write.

• A host of UP academics also https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/book/9781839105449/front-4.xmlcontributed their insights to the publication. Among them are Dr Selma Karuaihe, Dr Wegayehu Fitawek, Dr Moraka Makhura and Dr Lerato Phali (all lecturers in the UP Department of Agriculture Economics, Extension and Rural Development), Dr Enoch Owusu-Sekyere (a part-time lecturer in the same department), Dr Elizabeth Mkwandawire (research manager of FSNet-Africa at UP), Mr James Mukombwe, a member of the Food Security Research Group in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development, and Prof Irma Eloff, former Dean of the UP Faculty of Education and now Chair of the Global Network of Deans of Education (GNDE). Prisca Atieno and Pamela Madududu, Sukoluhle Mazwane, Mancoba Mndzebele, Valiant Odhiambo, Yetunde Olugbade (all UP PhD candidates in Agricultural Economics) and Andrea du Toit (a PhD candidate of the UP Department of Political Sciences) also co-wrote chapters.

• The Handbook on Public Policy and Food Security was published in 2024 by Edward Elgar Publishing. For more information, visit https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/handbook-on-public-policy-and-food-security-9781839105432.html  Hardback and e-book versions are available.