Food Insecurity in Small Island Developing States

Abstract

Food Security in Small Island States by John Connell and Kristen Lowitt (eds.), Singapore: Springer Natur Singapore. 2020. 318pp. ISBN 978-981-13-8255-0 (hc); 978-981-13-8258-1 (pb); 978-981-13-8256-7 (ebook). €124.79 (hc), €88.39 (pb), €71.68 (ebook). Sustainable development and governance in the Global South were long issues associated with Africa. In the last decade, particularly after the existential threat to the Maldives was brought to international attention through a 2011 documentary about its then president, Mohamed Nasheed, small island developing states (SIDS) have been recognised as some of the most seriously challenged in the Global South. Not only do SIDS face submersion due to rising sea levels, but on a more immediate timescale salinization will reduce limited freshwater availability on islands and much of the limited land resources for domestic agriculture will disappear. In the meantime, sea temperature change threatens to destroy marine life and the availability of both the fishing industry as an economic resource and as an alternative local source of food. Regional climate systems are changing too and subjecting more SIDS to extreme weather events. SIDS face significant challenges in balancing these threats with growing populations. It should be no surprise that they have come to the forefront in international pressure to halt climate change. But climate change is only one of several major challenges to the SIDS. As the contributors to John Connell and Kristen Lowitt’s edited volume Food Security in Small Island States show, SIDS also face other serious problems regarding food security that preceded the awareness of the challenges of climate change. The contributors examine a wide array of these challenges, all grouped together loosely as representing globalisation. Globalisation, it is argued, is gradually reducing the diversity of the production of land and sea as everyone in the SIDS has been absorbed into the cash economy. The case studies have been drawn from the Pacific and the Caribbean, where many of the SIDS, identified by the United Nations as including 52 states and territories, are located. The volume leaves out SIDS with a population of a million or more, such as Cuba, to reduce independent variables, although Papua New Guinea with just over eight million people is a frequent reference point. All the case studies included here are characterised by their small size, over-dependence on commerce, particularly imports, their limited resources, and their environmental vulnerability. Post-independence economic development turned many SIDS away from self-sufficiency and made them heavily dependent on imports of processed foods and drinks, making up a third of the value of all imports by the SIDS (p. 12). This has made these states more insecure regarding their food supply and dependent on outside sources which has raised the issue of food sovereignty, wherein everyone has a right to food and decisions about food markets should be made by the people dependent on them. The shift from subsistence to import dependence has led to health crises in many of the SIDS, due to nutritional and other health problems, including micronutrient deficiencies, child stunting, and obesity (p. 262). Moreover, things have gone from bad to worse in 2020–21. We still had not heard of COVID when the present volume went to press in January 2019 (p. vi). But in most SIDS, COVID will act as a risk multiplier, worsening the existing sustainability challenges. The key contribution of the volume is the collective assessments of responses in different SIDS to the food security challenges they all face. The various case studies reveal a diverse panoply of options where SIDS have attempted to transform small island food systems to make them more resilient and sustainable. Much of the adaptation and resilience is enabled at the level of the household, food insecurity being, in many SIDS, a problem not of food production or distribution, but rather of livelihood insecurity (p. v). Food insecurity in the SIDS is thus particularly reliant on bonding social capital between producers and the function of knowledge networks within the local community (p. 255). If policy change is going to be effective, it needs to elicit buy-in from practitioners and local communities and to develop socially robust knowledge (p. 18). Some of the larger geopolitical factors related to SIDS remains unexplored here, in part because many developments, such as ¨COVID, are very recent, the volume being the product of a 2015 special issue of Regional Environmental Change with additional chapters solicited afterwards. In the years since, China’s ambitious One Belt One Road vision for its trade corridors across Eurasia and the counter-response by the Quad states (the US, Australia, Japan, and India) has afforded new resources and aid to SIDS that would have otherwise not been available. As different powers vie for regional footholds, atolls become valuable assets to barter for development aid, China’s numerous projects in the Maldives provides a very good example. Elsewhere, such as in Papua New Guinea, interest shown by China has led to Japan and Australia upping the ante with better offers of aid. Such competition by the great powers may go far in providing additional sources of support for strategically placed SIDS. This is particularly true of nutritional challenges as public health often figures prominently in showcase aid projects. Regarding food insecurity per se, the situation in many SIDS, at least in the Pacific examples, is not yet as bad as it is in parts of Africa and South Asia (p. 32). Nevertheless, how far the SIDS will meet their sustainable development goals is perhaps more immediately dependent on the overall rate of climate change, which is effectively out of the control of local governments. The governments of SIDS can adapt to rising ocean levels only so far and for only so long. Certainly, some of the problems faced by small island states are shared by coastal populations on larger land masses, such as the deltaic population of Bangladesh. Nevertheless, while coastal populations elsewhere might be displaced and fragile states in particular unable to cope, the populations of the SIDS have nowhere else to go. While the present volume successfully lays out the scope of the issue of food insecurity and policy responses to food vulnerability that SIDS can undertake themselves, the larger existential challenge SIDS face depend for their resolution on how far more powerful states with larger industrial and commercial bases can continue to cooperate on reducing carbon emissions. Without global solutions, whether local innovations and adaptation are effective in responding to the challenges of food insecurity locally or not will be a moot issue. Michael W. Charney is Professor of Asian and Military History at SOAS, the University of London where he works on colonialism, security, violence, and refugees in Africa and Asia in the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Politics and International Studies and in the School of History, Religions, and Philosophy.