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Food security and sustainability: can one exist without the other?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2015

Elliot M Berry*
Affiliation:
Department of Human Nutrition and Metabolism, Braun School of Public Health, Hebrew University–Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem 91120, Israel
Sandro Dernini
Affiliation:
Forum on Mediterranean Food Cultures, Rome, Italy
Barbara Burlingame
Affiliation:
Department of Exercise and Nutritional Sciences, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
Alexandre Meybeck
Affiliation:
FAO, Agriculture and Consumer Protection Department, Rome, Italy
Piero Conforti
Affiliation:
FAO, Economic and Social Development Department, Rome, Italy
*
*Corresponding author: Email elliotb@ekmd.huji.ac.il
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Abstract

Objective

To position the concept of sustainability within the context of food security.

Design

An overview of the interrelationships between food security and sustainability based on a non-systematic literature review and informed discussions based principally on a quasi-historical approach from meetings and reports.

Setting

International and global food security and nutrition.

Results

The Rome Declaration on World Food Security in 1996 defined its three basic dimensions as: availability, accessibility and utilization, with a focus on nutritional well-being. It also stressed the importance of sustainable management of natural resources and the elimination of unsustainable patterns of food consumption and production. In 2009, at the World Summit on Food Security, the concept of stability/vulnerability was added as the short-term time indicator of the ability of food systems to withstand shocks, whether natural or man-made, as part of the Five Rome Principles for Sustainable Global Food Security. More recently, intergovernmental processes have emphasized the importance of sustainability to preserve the environment, natural resources and agro-ecosystems (and thus the overlying social system), as well as the importance of food security as part of sustainability and vice versa.

Conclusions

Sustainability should be considered as part of the long-term time dimension in the assessment of food security. From such a perspective the concept of sustainable diets can play a key role as a goal and a way of maintaining nutritional well-being and health, while ensuring the sustainability for future food security. Without integrating sustainability as an explicit (fifth?) dimension of food security, today’s policies and programmes could become the very cause of increased food insecurity in the future.

Information

Type
Review Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2015 
Figure 0

Fig. 1 The interrelationships between food security and sustainability

Figure 1

Fig. 2 The time dimension to food security: short-term stability (left side); long-term sustainability (right side)

Figure 2

Table 1 A compilation of indicators from the FAO, together with those incorporating sustainability as the long-term time dimension to the domains of food security using the example of sustainable diets