EHPnet: Special Programme for Food Security

Abstract

At the same time that developed countries—where an abundant stream of cheap and easily accessible food is ever ready for consumption—struggle to cope with increasing rates of obesity among their populations, the picture is strikingly different in the world’s less developed counties, where more than 800 million people are chronically undernourished. Food security—having physical and economic access to enough safe, nutritious food—is inextricably linked with environmental conditions. Weather extremes that impede growing conditions can limit or curtail food production, especially in regions where such conditions persist, and floods can cause rates of food-borne cholera to rise. Weather-related famines are now affecting millions of people in Africa, 12.5 million in Ethiopia alone. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s Special Programme for Food Security (SPFS), located online at http://www.fao.org/spfs/, is one effort to help developing countries improve their food security. The SPFS was begun in 1994 and endorsed at the 1996 World Food Summit, where delegates called for a halving of the number of malnourished people in the world by the year 2015. The program aims to improve nations’ food security through rapid increases in food production and productivity, by reducing year-to-year variability in food production, and by improving people’s access to food. The SPFS webpage provides a look at the work done by the program, offering information in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, and Spanish. The program currently provides assistance in 100 countries, most of which are termed “low-income food deficit countries.” The SPFS uses a two-phase approach to introducing new food management methods, described on the Phases and Approaches page. It first provides farmers and others working on the project with the basic essentials—seeds and farming implements—along with training in best practices. Each project has four components, including water control, intensification of crop production systems, diversification of production systems, and analysis and resolution of obstacles. In the second phase, successful approaches are scaled up, and the SPFS works at the national level in member countries to create a nationwide strategy for food security. Once a community agrees to use a new system, it is adapted, with community input, to best meet the community’s needs and take advantage of local resources. For example, a treadle pump developed in Bangladesh is now in use in several other Asian and African countries. This pump, described on the Best Practices page, allows more land to be irrigated with less strenuous labor involved than use of a traditional watering can. The Case Studies page includes a description of how the treadle pump was introduced in Zambia, allowing many farmers to double their growing area and grow new crops, with significant increases in income. Two of the SPFS regions, Asia and Central America, have sections within the main site. Here visitors can find information on the project work going on in specific countries within each region. Each country page includes geographic and economic overviews, information on training sessions, an outline of how the SPFS was implemented in that country, and a list of technologies developed there. For example, in Bangladesh, the SPFS was involved in developing a new cooking stove that uses less fuel and discharges smoke from the indoor environment, therefore reducing indoor concentrations of hazardous particulate matter.