Changes in Food Consumption and the Implications for Food Security and Undernourishment: India in the 1990s

This article examines the changes in the nature and quantity of food consumption in India during the reform decade of the 1990s, and analyses their implications for calorie intake and undernourishment. The study documents the decline in cereal consumption, especially in the urban areas, and provides evidence that suggests an increase in the prevalence of undernourishment over the period 1987/88 to 2001/2002. The results also point to a significant number of households, even in the top expenditure decile, suffering from undernourishment. This calls for a reassessment of the current strategy of directing the Targetted Public Distribution System (TPDS) exclusively at households ‘below the poverty line’. This study shows that, both as a source of subsidized calories and as a poverty reducing instrument, the PDS is of much greater importance to female‐headed households than it is to the rest of the population. Another important result is that, notwithstanding the sharp decline in their expenditure share during the 1990s, rice and wheat continue to provide the dominant share of calories, especially for the rural poor. The overall message is that, especially in a period of significant economic change, one needs to go beyond the standard expenditure‐based money metric measures to assess the changes in the living standards of households.     

Land Tenure and Food Security: Exploring Dynamic Linkages

Land tenure and food security have each been the subject of extensive—but generally separate—research in the past. Links between the two issues are now receiving increased attention, yet critical links between them remain unexplored. After a brief review of the two concepts, this article combines both issues within a dynamic framework that recognizes not just the conventional link between access to land and access to food in the short run, but also the recursive link between access to food and the ability to maintain sufficient resources to meet long-run needs. Such a framework makes explicit the trade-offs that poor households may face in bad years between consumption and investment in non-labour assets. Perhaps less intuitively, it also suggests that the need for self-insurance may force poor households to choose less efficient crops or production strategies than wealthier households even in good years. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these results for equity, efficiency, research, and policy.     

Power and Security Issues in the Middle East

Book reviewed in this article: Middle Eastern Security: Prospects for an Arms Control Regime, Efraim Inbar and Shmuel Sandler, editors The Quest for Hegemony in the Arab World: The Struggle over the Baghdad Pact, Elie Podeh     

Food Security and Russia's 2010 Drought

An American specialist on Russia's agricultural sector examines the progression and impact of that country's 2010 drought (the worst in a half-century), leading to a grain harvest one-third smaller than originally forecast. A particular focus is on the country's grain reserves and the government's response to drought in such areas as grain export policy and maintaining the size of the domestic livestock herd, responses which the author argues are conditioned by the drive for food security, a concept that has dominated the political discourse in tandem with resurgent economic nationalism during the post-Soviet period.     

Securing Fish for the Nation: Food Security and Governmentality in Japan

Abstract

Concerns about supplies of food have been a feature of Japanese politics since Japan started modernising in the second half of the 1800s. It has remained a prominent political issue even after Japan cemented its status as a wealthy country in the 1980s, with the Japanese Government continuing to protect domestic food production from international competition. Protectionism is a curious policy for a country so dependent on world trade, including for food. Protectionist practices have led to entrenched interests in some sections of government and industry. Protectionist ideas are used in nationalist arguments against food imports. The protection of domestic food production, however, resonates positively well beyond the groups that benefit economically from protection and those that indulge in chauvinist notions about the dangers of “foreign” food. The issue, therefore, is broader than interest-group capture or xenophobia. We find it is deeply embedded in Japanese policies relating to food domestically and internationally, and goes beyond government policy as such, involving ways of thinking about protection of national culture, and social and environmental responsibility. Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality helps to explain this approach to food security, accounting for the balancing act between free trade and protection as well as the pervasiveness of this rationality beyond government as such.     

Hungry for Justice: Social Mobilization on the Right to Food in India

This article explores the potential and limits of contemporary economic rights‐based social activism by analysing an ongoing ‘Right to Food Campaign’ in India. While social movement theory often positions radical and reform strategies as alternatives, the RTF campaign has adopted a hybrid strategy: it has made a radical legal demand that the right to food be recognized as intrinsic to the right to life, while seeking implementation of this right through reform of existing government feeding programmes. The campaign's dual strategy reflects two distinct logics of human rights: a logic of non‐derogable rights that are immediately actionable (such as the right to life) and a logic of progressive implementation of rights that can only be realized fully over time (such as economic rights). This article draws on original data to demonstrate that the campaign's radical legal demands framed around the non‐derogable right to life have come closer to fulfilment than its reformist demands around progressive implementation. The RTF campaign's relative success in galvanizing legal action on hunger is tempered by ongoing challenges in sustaining grassroots‐level mobilization and influencing public policy implementation.     

Legal Literacy and Immovable Property: Laws,Norms and Practices in Colombia

An equitable gender distribution of property ownership may be enhanced or limited by family law, individual knowledge of the law, and social norms. South America's laws of equal inheritance by sex and birth order and equal distribution of property upon divorce provide the basis of a gender‐equitable distribution of property ownership. This report of a qualitative case study exploring the gendered knowledge of immovable property laws and the practice of patterns of property ownership in central Colombia provides insights into the gap between law and practice caused by lack of information, social norms, gendered access to legal titles, a complex legal system and high transaction costs. It argues for greater attention to titling, legal procedures, legal education and legal advice to secure effective immovable property ownership for women.     

Amanda L. Logan: The Scarcity Slot: Excavating Histories of Food Security in Ghana

African Archaeological Review -     

Declining Food Security in a Philippine Oil Palm Frontier: The Changing Role of Cooperatives

The long‐held redistributive function of agricultural cooperatives — one of moral economy and poverty alleviation — has changed dramatically as they emerge as core brokers for agro‐industrial development in the so‐called ‘green economy’. This article examines the changing role of cooperatives involved in brokering oil palm production and its impact upon the food security and livelihoods of smallholders who labour in plantation regimes situated in historically uneven agrarian political economies. Findings show how, increasingly, cooperatives reinforce uneven agrarian social relations of production and exchange in which indigenous smallholders experience loss of land, poor wage labour conditions tinged with insecurity and prejudice, and mounting debt in an expanding oil palm complex. The article suggests that these changes in agrarian social relations negatively influence indigenous farmers’ food security pathways, with their access to and use of appropriate foods diminishing. It asserts that understanding the impacts of cooperatives on food security pathways requires a relational and situated analysis of livelihood change and agrarian relations in extractive frontiers.     

Linking Agricultural Biodiversity and Food Security: the Valuable Role of Agrobiodiversity for Sustainable Agriculture

In developed countries particularly, biodiversity is sometimes seen as a phenomenon that should be conserved for its own sake. However, it has become expensive to maintain, especially in those countries that have the greatest biodiversity. There is thus a need to look at how conservationists and other parties involved can work with business constructively. Tourism is arguably the main industry where there are at least some clear mutual benefits. Despite the convergence of interests, however, different groups within this arena express reservations. This article outlines the areas in which much still needs to be done to ensure that conservationists understand the priorities of the tourism industry and tourists themselves, and emphasizes the need for increased commercial development within the field of biodiversity, not least through education and communication.     

Global Agendas,Local Norms: Mobilizing around Unpaid Care and Domestic Work in Asia

This article explores the articulation and framing of unpaid care work and the mobilization around it at two spatial scales, the global and national. For the latter it focuses on three of the largest and most diverse countries in Asia — India, China and Indonesia. While the concept of unpaid care work has received considerable attention in international development discourse, it is rarely found in feminist mobilization and advocacy across these countries. The article asks why this issue remains largely excluded from women's political agendas. It also explores how it is framed when it is included. While most organizations recognize women's double burden and the importance of domestic labour, they do not consider ‘unpaid care work’ as a legitimate political issue around which to mobilize. Rather, it is framed, if at all, as part of other political agendas, such as the rights of the elderly (in China), the rights to social protection, especially childcare and maternity entitlements (in India), or the right to equal opportunities within marriage (in Indonesia). The study analyses the differences in framing, the conceptualization of gender equality embedded therein, and the implications for policy.     

Human Rights,Care Ethics and Situated Universal Norms

Abstract: As interest in the relationship between geography and ethics grows, it becomes important to examine how different approaches to ethical philosophy may fit with geographic scholarship. To that end, this article focuses on a particular approach to ethical responsibility—international human rights law—and asks how that approach can be put into conversation with discussions in geography about morality, distance and care. It explores three contributions of such a conversation: first, it examines how the relational ontology of care ethics provides a new perspective on the moral value of human rights, so that the relationships and context in question drive the relative value of rights. Second, the article discusses contributions that human rights can bring to questions of caring across distance. Finally, it unpacks the duties that accompany human rights and questions the scope of duty that attaches to the norm of equality.     

Single-Child Families in India: Levels,Trends and Determinants

This paper discusses a relatively new but an emerging demographic phenomenon of single-child families in India. This paper examines the levels, trends and determinants of single-child families using the data from three rounds of National Family Health Surveys (NFHS) conducted in 1992–1993, 1998–1999 and 2005–2006. The paper analyses women who have completed their reproductive life to understand the characteristics of single-child families. The results show that the proportion of single-child families is higher among the urban, educated and professionally employed women. Among the determinants, age at marriage and first birth, place of residence, economic and education status were significantly associated with single-child families.