Food Security and Complex Disasters

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to use a systems-thinking approach to provide an overview of food security in today’s world, in addition to discussing food insecurity and complex emergencies, specifically man-made and natural-technological complex disasters. Food is one of the basic life-sustaining needs of all living things. However, despite this, over 821 million people worldwide live in undernourishment, and food quantity and quality has only become a major policy topic in the last 40 years. Food security is the state of having access to a sufficient supply of food that is safe, nutritious, and meets the dietary needs and preferences for all individuals to maintain a healthy lifestyle at all times. However, the issues of food security are often muddied due to incongruent surveillance and reporting. The relationship of food security to complex disasters can be similarly convoluted by inconsistent data sources, confounding variables, and the endogenous nature of the relationship. In this chapter, the authors present a variety of disparate surveillance and reporting platforms that can be synthesized to better summarize the food security issue. Complex disasters were found to have a number of common challenges, including market collapse, displacement of peoples, and degradation of local agriculture, that increase food insecurity. These issues combined with the long-term health impacts of malnutrition can produce persistent social, political, and economic challenges that positively reinforce ongoing instability and exacerbate food insecurity.

The views and information presented are those of the author and do not represent the official position of the U.S. Army Medical Department Center and School Health Readiness Center of Excellence, the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, or the Departments of the Army/Navy/Air Force, Department of Defense, or U.S. Government.