Floods and food security: A method to estimate the effect of inundation on crops availability

An accurate assessment of food security and its challenges is essential for formulating effective measures and promoting sustainable socioeconomic development. This study develops an evaluation system for China's food security, focusing on four dimensions: food supply, food access, food production stability, and food continuity. The entropy weight extended matter element model is used for quantitative processing, which ensures that the integrity of the information can be guaranteed to a greater extent while reducing the influence of subjective factors, and then, the study evaluates the food security of different functional areas in China, and finally, it diagnoses the main obstacles to food security by using the obstacle degree model. (1) From 2000 to 2020, China's food security level fluctuated, initially declining, and then increasing. The food security level in major production and marketing areas is generally higher, while the primary marketing areas exhibit the lowest security levels. (2) The level of grain yields and the total power of machinery per unit area are the key factors affecting food security; the impact of inputs of agricultural materials (fertilizers and pesticides) on food security has decreased and is constantly stabilizing. In the main marketing area, the per capita food share is significantly lower than in the other functional areas, which has the greatest impact on food security. (3) Analysis of the obstacle factors reveals that the food supply and access security subsystems are crucial for ensuring national, production, and marketing security. From 2000 to 2020, the average obstacle degrees of food supply and food access security at the national level were 46.56% and 21.17%, respectively; for the production and marketing areas, they were 58.47% and 21.45%; and for primary marketing areas, they were 37.69% and 26.59%. In major grain-producing areas, the main obstacles lay within the food supply security and food production stability subsystems, with average obstacle degrees of 53.77% and 15.67%, respectively, from 2000 to 2020. The above results provide a scientific basis for comprehensively improving the level of food security in China, optimizing the structure of food production in each functional area, and formulating regionalized policies for stabilizing and maintaining food production and supply.

Who Eats, Where, What, and How? COVID-19, Food Security, and Canadian Foodscapes

The far-reaching impact of climate change on water resources, particularly its intensification of scarcity, poses a substantial threat to the sustainable management of water in agriculture. To enhance cross-sectoral decision-making at various scales, it is vital to quantify both current and future water consumption, employing methodologies that assess the agricultural water footprint (WF). This study employs the Site-sPecific Agricultural water Requirement and footprint Estimator (SPARE:WATER) to evaluate the susceptibility of green and blue agricultural WF at various scales across Colombia. The assessment is conducted under two CORDEX (Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment)-driven climate scenarios, RCP2.6 and RCP8.5. High-resolution (0.22°) CORDEX climate model projections are used to drive the SPARE:WATER model, while historical weather data from fifteen stations (1977-2005) are employed to bias-correct the model's gridded data using the Equal Quantile Matching (EQM) method. This corrected data was spatialized using IDW interpolation. Ten major crops are selected based on their national production significance, based on the National Agricultural Survey. Crop characteristics such as harvested area, yield, and crop coefficients are obtained from local and FAO sources. The analysis focuses on both green and blue WF for the near future (2060) and far future (2099), compared to the present (2020). Preliminary findings underscore a national WF of 45 km3/yr, with important variations at the departmental level. The spatial variability of WF is influenced by both wet and dry years.  Cocoa, coffee, and palm oil emerge as crops with the most substantial WF, showcasing respective water requirements of 30 k m3/t, 18 k m3/t, and 8 k m3/t nationally. Regional variations reveal the significance of crops such as plantain and banana in the agricultural WF landscape. Under the RCP2.6 scenario, the green and blue WF projections for 2060 and 2099 exhibit marginal changes relative to 2020. Conversely, under the RCP8.5 scenario, a discernible increase, particularly in blue WF, is evident, with a surge of 96% by 2099. This trajectory underscores the heightened water requirements anticipated for pivotal crops like cocoa and coffee in the future agricultural landscape. These findings underscore the urgent need for informed water management strategies in the future of Colombian agriculture, particularly in the face of a high-emission scenario. The results of this study can inform policy and decision-making aimed at ensuring sustainable water resources management and food security under the evolving climate landscape.

Food security in a just energy transition is a growing debate about designing sustainable food secure networks worldwide. Energy transition, land-use change, and food security are crucial factors for food security and provision. The increased demand for food products and customer preferences regarding food safety provide various issues for the current agriculture food supply chain (AFSC). Along with rising sustainability concerns, strict government regulation, food security, and traceability concerns compel managers, business houses, and practitioners working in AFSC to adopt new tools, techniques, and methodologies to model current food supply chain problems. Thus, in turn, design the food logistics network for food security. Hence, this study investigates the core determinants of food security and supply in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and Lebanon over the period of 2010–2019. In order to estimate the objectives of the study, we employ the fully modified ordinary least square (FMOLS) and dynamic ordinary least squares estimators (DOLS) to draw the study findings. However, the estimated results show a negative association of land use with food security and supply. Likewise, energy transition, gross domestic product, and agricultural value added (AVA) contribute to the food security supply. In contrast, urbanization's negative but insignificant contribution to the food supply in selected economies exists. Besides, another core objective of the study is to investigate the moderate role of the energy transition on the gross domestic product, agriculture sector, and land use and find the significant contribution to the food supply. However, the current study also tries forecasting for the next 10 years and employs the impulse response function (IRF) and variance decomposition analysis (VDA). Congruently, this study uses the pairwise panel causality test and finds exciting outcomes. The COVID-19 crisis has posed challenges such as energy consumption and food security issues. On behalf of the results, the current study proposes imperative policies to investigate the desired level of food supply. The findings provide valuable insights for experts, policymakers, and officials to take practical measures for energy use and food security challenges.

Rising agricultural water scarcity in China is driven by expansion of irrigated cropland in water scarce regions

Welcome to our special issue, More than a Disaster: Creativity in Growing, Distributing, and Accessing Food During COVID-19. At the time this is being published, the world is just a few weeks shy of the two-year mark from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and fighting the new Omicron variant. Anthropological work in the field of disaster studies has demonstrated that crises can be great “revealers” of underlying structural problems, especially inequality and socioeconomic dynamics (Hoffman and Oliver-Smith 2002) affecting communities. Further, despite the common refrain that “disasters are great equalizers,” research shows that disasters and crises frequently increase inequality by further marginalization of people due to asymmetry in access to recovery resources (this has been widely shown in the field but is summarized nicely by Faas et al. 2020). Both understandings hold true in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it has lasted long enough that most communities have experienced significant changes in challenges and impacts, especially in terms of food production, distribution, and access. Early on, in 2020, the pandemic deeply disrupted foodways. Community lockdowns suspended critical sources of food access through social programs such as school lunches; workplaces generated high exposure risks for agricultural laborers and grocery workers, and precarious food service workers lost even marginally reliable work and wages as restaurants closed their doors; and food shortages and waste were widespread. More recently, despite the astonishing achievement of vaccine development and its agonizingly unjust global distribution, supply chains continue to face major disruption, causing food shortages, global food prices have increased by 33% due to pandemic-related obstacles and extreme weather events (FAO 2021), and the cost of potash and ammonia (crucial fertilizers for agricultural production) have skyrocketed portending future food production challenges. The vulnerabilities, inequities, and fragility that the pandemic exposed in our food systems were new to some and an old story for many (Béné 2020). Amidst all the hunger, fear, uncertainty, and logistic problems that the COVID-19 pandemic brought, this special issue seeks bright spots as it examines whether lessons learned might carry forward beyond the pandemic to strengthen the means of production and consumption. Bringing together six research articles and one research commentary and spanning five continents, all authors tackle the following shared question as an organizing framework for their articles. What can we learn from the creativity among responses to the COVID-19 impacts on our food systems that might apply long beyond this pandemic? Writing in conversation with one another since October of 2020, contributors approach their diverse topics with a collective perspective that the COVID-19 pandemic came at a time when our food systems were already facing unprecedented challenges from climate change, economic and food insecurity, treatment-resistant agricultural pests and diseases, systemic marginalization and racism, environmental degradation, and water and land shortages. Through the cross-cutting themes of decolonizing research, governance, provisioning, and technology, this collection considers whether and why (or not) creativity in responses, actions, and meaning-making for people working on food production, distribution, and access might model strategies for more resilient, sustainable, and equitable food systems. Anthropology and the wider social sciences have been grappling with decolonization of the discipline for more than fifty years (Clifford 2005; Harrison 1991) with renewed energy in the last decade. Still, more must be done. In her timely research commentary, Lewis (Cherokee Nation Citizen) fills a void in the literature and argues that anthropology continually “fails to answer what the benefits of anthropology are to Indigenous people.” When the COVID-19 pandemic was severely impacting Indian Country, anthropology’s history of limited support and use of Indigenous scholars’ research on food sovereignty meant that meaningful engagement and amplification, and recognition of Native Nations’ successes and challenges were virtually absent. Lewis proposes centering Native scholars work and community-based participatory research and collaboration as the only possibility of decolonized research with U.S. Indigenous communities. Community-based research is not easy. Burch and Legun openly reflect on the importance and some challenges that arose for white researchers and Indigenous Māori researchers through auto-ethnographic examination of their co-designed collaborative project on agritech in Aotearoa, New Zealand. The authors theorize their approach using the concept of response-able mattering to unpack the choices made in research that include or exclude who matters. Burch and Legun detail project strains that stemmed from particular cultures of time that academic project members brought to the collaboration along with the troubling absence of key stakeholders as participants in the co-design. This was further complicated by the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic which thwarted plans to meaningfully address both of these issues. Optimistically, they conclude, “the pandemic may also prepare us better for the kinds of flexibility, adaptability, and response-ability best practiced going forward.” The role of governments in mediating the pandemic from facilitating to obstructing food access, production, and consumption spanned many of the articles in this issue. Authors Schneider and Gugganig offer a thoughtful examination of the social, economic, and policy-based contradictions that seasonal farmworkers, farmers, the German citizenry, and the national government were forced to confront when the COVID-19 pandemic brought them together in unexpected ways to get one third of the global hop production harvested. Their layered critique of inequalities for agricultural laborers, most of whom are temporary migrants doing work that is described as “dirty, dangerous, and demanding,” is skillfully delivered amidst the complexities of often enduring relationships among many of the farmers and the laborers who return annualy to their farms. O’Connell, Gay, McDonald, and Tayal’s article on food insecruity in central North Carolina found that while the U.S. Federal government was considered ineffective, actions by local governments, including through the redistribution of paid staff, were viewed as critically helpful in keeping local farmers in business and farmers markets safe and open. This type of redistribution of public resources for community good in times of crisis is rare and powerful, though not entirely unprecedented; for example, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency maintains training and a list of volunteers to “deploy” to other agency sites during disasters. Some state cooperative extension agencies have similar programs where county agents and specialists will relieve and support their counterparts across the state. Informal governance can sidestep the red tape of government programs but face similar struggles of inclusion and exclusion. In their study on food provisioning during the full lockdown in Wuhan, China, the originating point for COVID-19, Henrici and Ju describe the importance of informal social networks at bridging food access gaps created by formal distribution channels. Registered community members received organized delivery of food and other resources while unregistered migrant workers and many people who were stuck in the region unexpectedly because of the winter holidays who had no claim to community resources went unaccounted for. Henrici and Ju found that getting resources to those in need and seeking resources through cellular phone apps communication that followed social relationships bridged these gaps in the acute points of lockdown providing essential access to food for a significant portion of the population. Government programs sometimes increased inequality during the pandemic. Both Henrici and Ju, as well as Lyall, Havice, and Colloredo-Mansfeld in their study on food access and security in Ecuador, detailed very strict national government responses in China and Ecuador. In both cases, the governments chose to inhibit open-air markets and smaller producers while prioritizing commercial groceries, and in both cases, inequality increased. Meanwhile, Hall’s thought-provoking article on wild food provisioning as a food security method in Appalachia during the pandemic notes that the existence of a program does not directly translate to actual impact as is the case with government-supported wild game distribution programs that distribute game to food insecure households in “almost every state in the U.S.” but complete very limited quantities of donations in comparison to meat harvested. The work of locating availability and gathering food safely during the pandemic is familiar for most readers in some form or another through personal experience. Provisioning work is often a productive space for thinking through structural inequalities, and the articles in this issue examine the topic through the lens of gender, race, and class. Henrici and Ju hypothesized that there would be a distinct gendered pattern to provisioning activities in Wuhan, but they ultimately determined that socioeconomics was more significant as a predictor. In interviews, they learned from participants that they often used new forms of technology to redistribute provisions to those excluded from formal channels of distribution through charity and through entrepreneurship, selling items in makeshift marketplaces created using their cellular phones. In studying pandemic responses that leverage traditional forms of provisioning, Hall reminds us that even subsistence strategies such as hunting carry sociopolitical power is unevenly distributed. Here he writes that land “entangles the realities of race and… ownership, which, has implications for who has access to wild food provisioning spaces…. Outside of reservation and treaty lands, Indigenous people have been completely dispossessed of their homelands with broad and ongoing negative impacts to Indigenous foodways. Black folks have and continue to be deliberately excluded from land use self-determination through white violence, perhaps most notably during the post-emancipation and reconstruction eras in the U.S.” Intentionally making use of the disruptions from the pandemic as an opportunity for their ongoing work, Lyall, Vallejo, Colloredo-Mansfeld, and Havice describe how some urban collectives and neighborhood organizations in Ecuador made gains in shifting circulation patterns of agroecological foods to reach low-income urban neighborhoods. Technology plays an important role in all the case studies and even in the way that much of this research was enacted safely and in semi-novel ways during the pandemic. Some of the studies in this issue were in progress when the pandemic began, while others worked to use their research skills to help or learn something about the unprecedented global experience that has left more than 5 million people dead as of December 2021. Research during and after a disaster always presents additional ethical and logistical challenges to human subject research, and anthropologists were quick to recognize that the pandemic exponentially increased these challenges (Marino et al. 2020). All studies in this collection contribute examples of methods during and for crisis. Burch and Legun moved their research online with participants that they had already established rapport with, while O’Connell et al. opted to recruit and interview study participants online and socially distanced in-person meetings as each participant preferred. Henrici and Ju describe the difficulty of communicating over government authorized digital platforms with study participants declining to continue once they moved online due to privacy concerns. The changing nature of COVID-19 information and networks for locating and mobilizing resources in this special issue showed variations across our food systems worldwide, which exist in states of global hyperconnectivity and surprisingly intimate local linkages. Technology became both a barrier and a bridge to existing and newly formed knowledge networks across several of the studies. In Ecuador Lyall, Vallejo, Colloredo-Mansfeld, and Havice found that the changes many agroecological organizations using digital technologies made to meet consumer demands increased distribution by up to 400%. Yet the same innovations were ultimately unsustainable when traditional markets reopened, and demand receded. Detailing the important flexibility of these agroecological organizations’ ability to meet people’s needs during an acute time and then return to pre-COVID or slightly elevated levels is an important case for responsiveness function as an important feature of meeting challenges to food systems. Difficulties in learning or accessing the technology platforms were also presented as a barrier for some in both Henrici and Ju and O’Connell, Gay, McDonald, and Tayal’s studies. In contrast, Lewis’ American Indian foodpreneurs likely reached a larger audience by moving to an online YouTube format and expanding accessibility beyond the immediate campus community. Technological innovations were most successful when they fulfilled a widely recognized need. Schneider and Gugganig contend that the success of the digital platforms for recruiting new farm to laborer relationships was bolstered by the cultural value for German hops by citizens. Across the case studies, the examples of technology adoption and innovation are numerous, but the ethnographic details of how and in what form such changes came about are just as important for thinking through staying power and weighing potential adaptive capacity of these changes. This special issue’s articles also detail methodological innovations that researchers may find useful as the pandemic continues and as other crises unfold. The joy of organizing the authors and editing this special issue for me has been in seeing remarkable synergies between their works unfold. This collection of articles presents strong cases for rejecting common dichotomies used within food systems studies (either production or consumption) and for framing sustainability in agriculture (large-scale multinational versus local and small-scale). Through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic, or “being in the [COVID-19] world” as Heidegger might say, these cases emphasize the importance of maintaining diverse forms of production, consumption, and policies and the bodies that enact them that have meaning well beyond the pandemic context. Most importantly, the subject that we did not coordinate but hums with an insistent energy through all the articles, is the clear imperative for justice and equality. Food insecurity can never truly be addressed without also addressing food sovereignty and justice. Lewis argues for this as a “new mode of food sovereignty research” that leads with the political context for Indigenous people, in contrast to less politically oriented classic food studies. Similarly, food justice work, and its sometime allied field of environmental justice, have long been driven by the work of Black, brown, and Indigenous scholars, organizers, and activists (Garth and Reese 2020). What this special issue makes clear is that no resilient food system is achievable without redressing systemic inequality and attending to justice in every element of our research, production, consumption, and access for humans and the environment alike. As you explore this special issue, I urge you to read individual articles as contributions to a plurality of ways forward through the array of problems our food systems face from climate change and the deeply rooted inequality for people and the environment entwined in the politics and practice of food making, eating, and meaning. The bright spots and innovative responses to challenges from COVID-19 within this issue underscore our humanity as complex but warm and capable of grappling with the contradictions embedded in our food systems laid bare during the pandemic. Ethnography, when done well, is a powerful tool for meeting this imperative as anthropologists and ethnographic work in allied disciplines gather, amplify, and focus human experiences with attention to justice for everyone. Collectively, this special issue sets forth a compelling research agenda that centers justice and challenges inequality across research design, implementation, and dissemination. This collection calls for work and action on food, labor, environmental health, and policy that we invite you to join, for our shared food futures.

The Big Question

This study investigates the impact of economic inflation on food security and accessibility through the development of an econometric modeling approach. As inflation rates rise, the purchasing power of consumers diminishes, leading to increased food prices and potentially exacerbating food insecurity. This research aims to quantify the relationship between inflation and food security indicators, such as availability, access, utilization, and stability of food supplies. By employing time-series data and econometric techniques, the model captures the dynamic interactions between inflation rates, food prices, and socioeconomic factors affecting food security. The model incorporates key variables, including consumer price index (CPI), food inflation, income levels, and unemployment rates, to analyze their collective impact on food security across different demographics. The findings indicate that rising inflation significantly correlates with higher food prices, disproportionately affecting low-income households and vulnerable populations. This relationship highlights the necessity of understanding inflation's broader implications on food accessibility, especially in regions where food security is already a pressing issue. Future research directions are proposed, focusing on policy interventions aimed at stabilizing food prices and enhancing food security. Potential strategies include price controls, subsidies for staple foods, and targeted social safety nets for low-income households. Additionally, the study suggests further examination of supply chain factors contributing to food price volatility, such as transportation costs and global market dynamics, which can exacerbate inflation's effects on food security. This research contributes to the literature on food security by providing empirical evidence of inflation's impact on food accessibility and identifying critical areas for policy intervention. By addressing the complex interplay between inflation and food security, stakeholders, including policymakers and food industry leaders, can develop informed strategies to mitigate adverse effects and promote food security in inflationary environments.

This chapter reviews potential impacts of climate change on food security and nutrition in Southern Africa. Southern Africa is warming at twice the global rate, and many countries are being affected by multiple shocks at the same time. The average number of climate-related disasters/hazards has increased by nearly 35% since the 1990s. More frequent and intense extreme events increase food insecurity and malnutrition by destroying lands, livestock, crops and food supplies in Southern Africa. In Southern Africa, climate change means a warmer and drier climate and greater exposure to multiple climatic hazards including droughts, floods, cyclones, and warmer, shorter growing seasons. The review shows that the four pillars of food security, that is, availability, access, utilization and stability are affected by climate change. The strategies to address climate change impacts on food security are discussed and suggestions to improve them are analysed. Climate change is changing the dynamics of pests and diseases of both livestock and crops. In Southern Africa, new pests like fall armyworms, Tuta absoluta have negatively affected the productivity of maize and tomato crops.Food access and stability may be affected through disruption of market prices, infrastructure, transport, manufacturer and retail as well as direct and indirect changes in income and food-purchasing power of low-income consumers. Food utilization may be directly affected by climate change due to increase in mycotoxins in food and feed. Increase in water-borne diseases under climate change such as cholera which has been rampant in Southern Africa can reduce food utilization. Extreme weather events, such as droughts, floods and cyclones, which have been on the increase in Southern Africa recently will affect the stability of food supply directly through disruption of transport and markets. Although climate adaptation, mitigation and resilient building will take many years, in the meantime, humanitarian food assistance is vital to address the impacts of climate change on food and nutritional security in the short term.KeywordsNutrition burdensFood systemsAdaptationResilienceClimate hazards

The Need for Investment in Rigorous Interventions to Improve Child Food Security

In the era of COP28, where most of the developed and developing economies concentrate more on the development of environmentally friendly energy resources to tackle the issue of climate change. Nevertheless, the literature lacks appropriate evidence regarding the influences of green energy and other resources on food security. This study analyses the influences of land use, green energy, and water resources on food accessibility in emerging economies, while also considering the important roles of natural resources, research and development (R&D) expenditure, and economic growth during 1980–2020. Due to non‐linear data dispersion, the novel moments quantile regression is employed. Results assert that land use has a positive significant influence on food accessibility in the presence of water resources and a weaker negative impact in the presence of natural resources. Natural and water resources are detrimental to food accessibility in the Emerging Seven (E7) countries. Furthermore, R&D expenditure and green energy positively (negatively), while economic growth negatively (positively) impacted food accessibility in the presence of natural resources (water resources). The results are robust and validate causal inferences that help develop appropriate policies for emerging economies concerning food accessibility or security. In this rapidly evolving era, most empirical studies consider environmental quality. Conversely, this study contributes to the literature by examining the factors influencing food accessibility, as this issue is of considerable importance because of the rapidly growing global population.

Purpose This study aims to investigate the nexus among economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and food security, while also analyzing the mediating effect of financial inclusion in mitigating the adverse impacts of EPU and strengthening food security in developing countries. Design/methodology/approach Using a quantitative approach, panel data from 2004 to 2021 for 24 countries was evaluated to develop a comprehensive food security index covering four dimensions: food supply, food access, food utilization and food stability, which are further composed of 12 elements. The “Baron and Kenny Three Step Methodology” together with Sobel test was used to investigate the direct and mediating impact of financial inclusion on the association among EPU and food security. To mitigate the issue of endogeneity, instrumental variable technique and two-step generalized methods of moments (GMM) were used. For robustness, the authors use the average mean of EPU as a substitute and use Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) No. 2 (No Hunger) as an alternative measure of food security. Findings The findings indicate that EPU adversely affects overall food security, including its dimensions such as food supply, food access, food utilization and food stability. This study further demonstrates that financial inclusion plays a significant mediating role in the association among EPU and food security. The results highlight that financial inclusion emerged as a notable factor in mitigating the negative effects of EPU on food security. Practical implications Governments and policymakers should prioritize and implement programs aimed at improving financial inclusion, which will help individuals and nations to adopt required tools they need to build resilience against EPU, and ultimately safeguarding their food security. This eventually leads toward attainment of not only SDG 2 (No Hunger) but also assists in achieving SDG 1 (No Poverty) and SDG 10 (Inequality Reduction). These comprehensive efforts will also lead to the establishment of sustainable future for all. Originality/value There is limited body of research that explores the interplay of these three variables within a single study. Likewise, the role of financial inclusion as a mediator in the association among EPU and food security represents a novel contribution. The study uses a multi-indicator approach to comprehensively measure key variables such as food security and financial inclusion.

Strategies for agricultural production management based on land, water and carbon footprints on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

Agriculture production is directly dependent on climate change and weather. Possible changes in temperature, precipitation and CO2 concentration are expected to significantly impact crop growth and ultimately we lose our crop productivity and indirectly affect the sustainable food availability issue. The overall impact of climate change on worldwide food production is considered to be low to moderate with successful adaptation and adequate irrigation. Climate change has a serious impact on the availability of various resources on the earth especially water, which sustains life on this planet. The global food security situation and outlook remains delicately imbalanced amid surplus food production and the prevalence of hunger, due to the complex interplay of social, economic, and ecological factors that mediate food security outcomes at various human and institutional scales. Weather aberration poses complex challenges in terms of increased variability and risk for food producers and the energy and water sectors. Changes in the biosphere, biodiversity and natural resources are adversely affecting human health and quality of life. Throughout the 21st century, India is projected to experience warming above global level. India will also begin to experience more seasonal variation in temperature with more warming in the winters than summers. Longevity of heat waves across India has extended in recent years with warmer night temperatures and hotter days, and this trend is expected to continue. Strategic research priorities are outlined for a range of sectors that underpin global food security, including: agriculture, ecosystem services from agriculture, climate change, international trade, water management solutions, the water-energy-food security nexus, service delivery to smallholders and women farmers, and better governance models and regional priority setting. There is a need to look beyond agriculture and invest in affordable and suitable farm technologies if the problem of food insecurity is to be addressed in a sustainable manner. Introduction Globally, agriculture is one of the most vulnerable sectors to climate change. This vulnerability is relatively higher in India in view of the large population depending on agriculture and poor coping capabilities of small and marginal farmers. Impacts of climate change pose a serious threat to food security. “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (World Food Summit, 1996). This definition gives rise to four dimensions of food security: availability of food, accessibility (economically and physically), utilization (the way it is used and assimilated by the human body) and stability of these three dimensions. According to the United Nations, in 2015, there are still 836 million people in the world living in extreme poverty (less than USD1.25/day) (UN, 2015). And according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), at least 70 percent of the very poor live in rural areas, most of them depending partly (or completely) on agriculture for their livelihoods. It is estimated that 500 million smallholder farms in the developing world are supporting almost 2 billion people, and in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa these small farms produce about 80 percent of the food consumed. Climate change threatens to reverse the progress made so far in the fight against hunger and malnutrition. As highlighted by the assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC), climate change augments and intensifies risks to food security for the most vulnerable countries and populations. Few of the major risks induced by climate change, as identified by IPCC have direct consequences for food security (IPCC, 2007). These are mainly to loss of rural livelihoods and income, loss of marine and coastal ecosystems, livelihoods loss of terrestrial and inland water ecosystems and food insecurity (breakdown of food systems). Rural farmers, whose livelihood depends on the use of natural resources, are likely to bear the brunt of adverse impacts. Most of the crop simulation model runs and experiments under elevated temperature and carbon dioxide indicate that by 2030, a 3-7% decline in the yield of principal cereal crops like rice and wheat is likely in India by adoption of current production technologies. Global warming impacts growth, reproduction and yields of food and horticulture crops, increases crop water requirement, causes more soil erosion, increases thermal stress on animals leading to decreased milk yields and change the distribution and breeding season of fisheries. Fast changing climatic conditions, shrinking land, water and other natural resources with rapid growing population around the globe has put many challenges before us (Mukherjee, 2014). Food is going to be second most challenging issue for mankind in time to come. India will also begin to experience more seasonal variation in temperature with more warming in the winters than summers (Christensen et al., 2007). Climate change is posing a great threat to agriculture and food security in India and it's subcontinent. Water is the most critical agricultural input in India, as 55% of the total cultivated areas do not have irrigation facilities. Currently we are able to secure food supplies under these varying conditions. Under the threat of climate variability, our food grain production system becomes quite comfortable and easily accessible for local people. India's food grain production is estimated to rise 2 per cent in 2020-21 crop years to an all-time high of 303.34 million tonnes on better output of rice, wheat, pulse and coarse cereals amid good monsoon rains last year. In the 2019-20 crop year, the country's food grain output (comprising wheat, rice, pulses and coarse cereals) stood at a record 297.5 million tonnes (MT). Releasing the second advance estimates for 2020-21 crop year, the agriculture ministry said foodgrain production is projected at a record 303.34 MT. As per the data, rice production is pegged at record 120.32 MT as against 118.87 MT in the previous year. Wheat production is estimated to rise to a record 109.24 MT in 2020-21 from 107.86 MT in the previous year, while output of coarse cereals is likely to increase to 49.36 MT from 47.75 MT. Pulses output is seen at 24.42 MT, up from 23.03 MT in 2019-20 crop year. In the non-foodgrain category, the production of oilseeds is estimated at 37.31 MT in 2020-21 as against 33.22 MT in the previous year. Sugarcane production is pegged at 397.66 MT from 370.50 MT in the previous year, while cotton output is expected to be higher at 36.54 million bales (170 kg each) from 36.07. This production figure seem to be sufficient for current population, but we need to improve more and more with vertical farming and advance agronomic and crop improvement tools for future burgeoning population figure under the milieu of climate change issue. Our rural mass and tribal people have very limited resources and they sometime complete depend on forest microhabitat. To order to ensure food and nutritional security for growing population, a new strategy needs to be initiated for growing of crops in changing climatic condition. The country has a large pool of underutilized or underexploited fruit or cereals crops which have enormous potential for contributing to food security, nutrition, health, ecosystem sustainability under the changing climatic conditions, since they require little input, as they have inherent capabilities to withstand biotic and abiotic stress. Apart from the impacts on agronomic conditions of crop productions, climate change also affects the economy, food systems and wellbeing of the consumers (Abbade, 2017). Crop nutritional quality become very challenging, as we noticed that, zinc and iron deficiency is a serious global health problem in humans depending on cereal-diet and is largely prevalent in low-income countries like Sub-Saharan Africa, and South and South-east Asia. We report inefficiency of modern-bred cultivars of rice and wheat to sequester those essential nutrients in grains as the reason for such deficiency and prevalence (Debnath et al., 2021). Keeping in mind the crop yield and nutritional quality become very daunting task to our food security issue and this can overcome with the proper and time bound research in cognizance with the environment. Threat and challenges In recent years, climate change has become a debatable issue worldwide. South Asia will be one of the most adversely affected regions in terms of impacts of climate change on agricultural yield, economic activity and trading policies. Addressing climate change is central for global future food security and poverty alleviation. The approach would need to implement strategies linked with developmental plans to enhance its adaptive capacity in terms of climate resilience and mitigation. Over time, there has been a visible shift in the global climate change initiative towards adaptation. Adaptation can complement mitigation as a cost-effective strategy to reduce climate change risks. The impact of climate change is projected to have different effects across societies and countries. Mitigation and adaptation actions can, if appropriately designed, advance sustainable development and equity both within and across countries and between generations. One approach to balancing the attention on adaptation and mitigation strategies is to compare the costs and benefits of both the strategies. The most imminent change is the increase in the atmospheric temperatures due to increase levels of GHGs (Green House Gases) i.e. carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) etc into the atmosphere. The global mean annual temperatures at the end of the 20th

The present research is realised in the frame of the ZEU project “LUCA” (Land Use, Ecosystem Services and Human Welfare in Central Asia). LUCA builds a platform for joint analysis of land use effects for a whole region, involving participants from various countries of Central Asia. In the transition from planned to market economies, the Central Asian Republics experienced rising poverty, food insecurity and malnutrition as well as serious degradation of water and land resources. The process to a market oriented economy has not been adequately supported by national institutional development. It resulted in a reduced living standard. Land use strategies in Uzbekistan determine the level of food security. While the area of rangelands is vast, the livestock farming and production of grains, fruits and vegetables play a major role in food security and also are the basic source of rural population income. More than 60% of Uzbeks live in rural area. Uzbekistan produces adequate calories to supply the population but almost 30 % lives below the food poverty line (IFPRI, 2006). The poorest population spends more than 60 % of income for food and takes a diet dominated by cereals. The existing system of the “state order” to produce cotton and wheat does not allow to growing up food crops in adequate amount. The survey is focused on questions on the socio-economic situation, societal determinants of food supply, food consumption patterns, eating habits, and coping strategies managing food crisis on household level. Markhamat region of Andijan province and Denau region of Surkhandarya province are the two most populated regions of Uzbekistan and presented as the study area. The data collection is based on the own structured questionnaire, on the Household Food Security Survey Module (HFSSM), Food Consumption Score (FCS), and Food List Recall. Data analysis was done with SPSS. The main results show the percentage of food secure and food insecure households as well as the food consumption status of these households concerning cash and food crops households are producing on their farm land and/or on their homestead plot. The results show that the main indicator of the level of income, food security situation and food consumption status of household is the production strategy. Thereby the more households produce cotton and wheat they will have less income, and a worse food security and food consumption status.