Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter objectives
Rapid population expansion, coupled with static or declining per capita agricultural produc-
tion and inadequate growth in alternative economic activities, has resulted in persistent food
security problems in many of the world's poorest countries. These trends make countries with
a rapidly expanding demand for food much more vulnerable to climate variability, since there
are many food insecure people with very little ability to purchase food even in years with
above average food production. In this chapter, the objective is to demonstrate how climate
variability as measured by satellite remote sensing described in
Chapter 3
is likely to affect
food security at the national level. Through an exploration of the convergence of trends in
agricultural capacity, population expansion and rainfall, a general assessment of the import-
ance of climate variability to food security is presented.
What is national food security?
National food security is defined by the FAO as being a comprehensive picture of the amount of
calories available in aggregate for each person in the country (FAO, 2012). Established using “food
balance sheets,” national food security describes for each food item the sources of supply and its
utilization during a specified period. To calculate food supply, total quantity of foodstuffs produced
in a country is added to the total quantity imported and adjusted by any change in stocks that may
have occurred since the beginning of the reference period. On the utilization side, the food sup-
plies available for human consumption is calculated by removing from the total food available the
quantities exported, fed to livestock, used for seed, processed for alcoholic and non-food uses, and
lost during storage and transportation. The per capita supply of each such food item available for
human consumption is then obtained by dividing the total quantity of available food by the total
population using it, and then is expressed in quantities of calories, protein and fat (FAO, 2002).
At the national scale, making these exact calculations of food produced, lost, then traded
across borders and consumed is enormously complicated. As FEWS NET states in its review
of Zambia's food balance sheet:
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