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Food security and environmental degradation: evidence from developing countries

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Abstract

In recent times, food security has received growing attention as a means to alleviate hunger, and to ensure sustainable supply of nutritious, secure and accessible food to the population. The importance of these areas has seen food security continues to feature prominently on global agenda. Nevertheless, the rapid growth of food production has raised concern among environmentalists, in particular with regard to the threat posed to environmental quality. Therefore, this study attempts to explore the impact of food security on environmental degradation by using GMM estimator and utilizes data spanning from 2008 to 2016 for 110 developing countries. The empirical results show that the level of environmental degradation tends to be higher with a higher level of food security. Hence, the policy focuses on deterioration mitigation needs to be emphasized and enforced to reduce emissions from the food system.

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Notes

  1. The rest of the pillars is as follows: quality education (4th pillar), gender quality (5th pillar), clear water and sanitation (6th pillar), decent work and economic growth (8th pillar), industry innovation and infrastructure (9th pillar), is sustainable cities and communities (11th pillar), responsible consumption and production (12th pillar), peace, justice and strong institutions (16th pillar) and partnerships for the goals (17th pillar). The detail can be obtained from https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals.

  2. This is particularly true when the long-term sustainable economic development of host countries is unlikely to continue in the long run, combined with the amount of destruction suffered by most developing countries. Of course, the idea does not necessarily to place all the blames to FDI.

  3. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an analytical tool that captures the overall environmental impacts of a product, process or human activity from raw material acquisition, through production and use, to waste management. This comprehensive view makes LCA unique in the suite of environmental management tools (Curran 2013). Biophysical methods are techniques to study the structure, properties, dynamics or function of biomolecules at an atomic or molecular level. They encompass a range of techniques including microscopy, spectroscopy, electrophysiology, single-molecule methods and molecular modeling (Tounge and Parker 2011).

  4. To be precise, the index constructed here is the only one of four dimension of food security, which is food availability. The other dimensions are food utilization, food stability and food accessibility. They are not included as theoretically, they are not directly related to environmental issue.

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Funding

Funding was provided by Ministry of Education Malaysia Grant No. (No. 203.PMGT.6711758).

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  1. Universiti Sains Malaysia, Minden, Malaysia

    Yogeeswari Subramaniam & Tajul Ariffin Masron

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  1. Yogeeswari Subramaniam
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All authors have participated in (a) conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of the data; (b) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and (c) approval of the final version.

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Correspondence to Yogeeswari Subramaniam.

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Subramaniam, Y., Masron, T.A. Food security and environmental degradation: evidence from developing countries. GeoJournal 86, 1141–1153 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-019-10119-w

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