Parallel concepts coming together – Food Security meets Sustainability

This month’s featured paper is from Public Health Nutrition and is entitled ‘Food security and sustainability: can one exist without the other’.  The authors consider the concept of sustainability within the context of food security and propose a new model of multi-level interactions between food security and sustainability (below). The situation beforeThe development of the concepts of Food Security and of Sustainability have run in parallel over the past 40 years or so. Food Security originally had three elements – Availability, Accessibility and Utilization. It was only after the food crisis of 2007-8 that a fourth component was added - that of Stability. This introduced a time dimension with the ability to withstand shocks to the food system caused by natural or man-made disasters. Sustainable development also originally involved three aspects – Environment, Economic and Social. It is a systems approach to harness capital (natural, produced and social) for the welfare of present and future generations and incorporates issues such as land and natural resource conservation and development as well as the wider concerns of human development, including public health, nutrition education and standard of living. Added value of the articleFrom Pillars to Pathways: We proposed to change the notion of the four food security dimensions from a portrayal as independent pillars of equal importance to a pathway of interacting elements with a time dimension (see Figure). Furt...
Source: The Nutrition Society - Category: Nutrition Authors: Source Type: news