Food Crisis Mitigation: The Need for an Enhanced Global Food Governance

Abstract

As demands for food rise faster than supplies, the resulting food-price ­inflation puts severe stress on many countries already teetering on the edge of chaos. As a result, almost no country is currently completely immune from the impacts of food shortage. If the food situation continues to deteriorate, entire nations and their social orders will break down at an unprecedented rate because, in geopolitical terms, deeper food crisis will undoubtedly engender more collective insecurity. Paradoxically, widespread hunger exists today in a context of a global food oversupply. Often, people go hungry because they either have no means to produce their own food or earn enough money to buy it, not because of a global shortage of food. Thus, access to food can be identified as the major issue in food security rather than the amounts of food being produced. Therefore, this chapter presumes that the whole issue is more of a governance challenge, promotion of the right to adequate food and the food sovereignty. In other terms, at the root of the failure to effectively reduce hunger, the failure of the global food security governance and architecture is a key factor. So, it is becoming increasingly crucial to develop and implement adequate global food governance arrangements from a North-South redistribution perspective, with the active involvement of major stakeholders and the support of sound scientific evidence.