Event Name: Current State of Global Food Security with Noel Habashy, Paul Maina, Aaron Schwoebel, Heidi Manley
Event Time and Place: Friday, February 23, 2024 from 1:00 pm to 2:00pm
The seminar addresses food security when people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life. From which food security has four components which are availability, access, utilization, and stability. The seminar also addresses that covid, climate, and conflict have had a huge impact on food security. Africa and specifically sub-saharan Africa has a lot of widespread issues regarding food security, Asia is where the highest number of people are dealing with food security though as most of the world lives there. The seminar mentions that the United States and many other non profit organizations are working hard to combat this problem. The seminar also goes in depth about Kenya and details how 70% of the rural population rely on agriculture for food. This becomes complicated as the population is increasing as it has in Kenya while at the same time the land is becoming less and less productive. The seminar addresses agricultural economics and how some politics has to do with complicating the matters and it being harder to get to a solution which may seem straightforward. Finally the seminar states that moving forward it’s important to have open markets between countries as otherwise you can have a situation where some countries will put export bans on rice raising the price of rice which has happened recently. It’s also important to focus on bio-technology and having genetically engineered food as that would increase the availability of food.
For the most part I feel the talk was pretty convincing about the topic of food security and I feel their definition of food security was pretty well put together and more complex than my initial thought of the topic. Regarding their points of food security, they broke up food security into four categories which were availability, accessibility, utilization, and stability. With the availability part they mentioned that there are places they grouped as food deserts. These are places in an urban area where you're more than a mile away from a supermarket, in rural areas it’s 10 miles. In my personal opinion I feel this scale is a bit off especially for first world countries where I would tend to feel that given a first world country’s resources we should make the distance say 5 or 7 miles. Also I feel like in third world countries, a lot of these places like in Kenya which the seminar talked a lot about in depth, a lot of the places there would be more than 10 miles away from a supermarket. So I feel they should have given more insight on this scale rather than just generalizing the state of the world. Though I will say I did like how they addressed the various factors that concern food security like covid which most people I feel like would have moved away from or really understated it’s impact on food security. The seminar’s insight on climate change was also pretty convincing for me as I do recognize that climate change can create more extreme weather conditions like droughts and floods which greatly impact land for agriculture. The seminar also mentioned the Russia and Ukraine war and the impact it had on grain and global food security which I thought was pretty interesting. I have some background knowledge knowing that both countries produce a good amount of grain but I found it interesting that Russia’s grain exports seem to be impacted by politics. Given that the seminar does to a decent extent have to do with the U.S government I found it interesting that they mentioned the need for Russia’s grain to get out there and that over two hundred million people are impacted. Towards the end of the seminar it was mentioned that the world needs open markets for global food security to be better off and that some countries had put export bans on rice raising its price. The seminar inferred this as a bad thing but from my previous knowledge I know that India not too long ago did this and I see like they saw this as a negative thing. However I also know that India did this to solve its own population problems with food and to lower the rice prices over there. I think they did the right thing to worry about their population's needs first and foremost. So the way I saw this seminar is that it’s not addressing the full side to some of the politics of global food security and I think that has to do with its ties to the U.S government. Apart from that though I feel like they did a great job talking about food security and its need to be solved and what it truly is. I just feel when it came time to talk about the political nature of this topic they were very one sided.