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Open Access 2016 | Open Access | Buch

Eating, Drinking: Surviving

The International Year of Global Understanding - IYGU

herausgegeben von: Peter Jackson, Walter E.L. Spiess, Farhana Sultana

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buchreihe : SpringerBriefs in Global Understanding

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Über dieses Buch

This publication addresses the global challenges of food and water security in a rapidly changing and complex world. The essays highlight the links between bio-physical and socio-cultural processes, making connections between local and global scales, and focusing on the everyday practices of eating and drinking, essential for human survival. Written by international experts, each contribution is research-based but accessible to the general public.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

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Open Access

Introduction: Understanding the Complexities of Eating, Drinking, and Surviving

Abstract

This introduction to a series of essays on the global challenges of food and water security, commissioned as part of the International Year of Global Understanding, provides a definition of key terms and an historical context to these contemporary issues. It discusses the human right to adequate food and water, outlining some of the political struggles that have arisen over accessing these vital resources. Patterns of ‘under-’ and ‘over-consumption’ are discussed and analyzed, measured against the targets set in the Millennium Development and Sustainable Development Goals. The essays share a common approach, linking global challenges to the realities of everyday life and emphasizing the connections between biophysical and socio-cultural processes. The essays also address a number of cross-cutting themes including gender, ethnic and religious diversity, and the emotional and affective dimensions of life, going beyond questions of survival to incorporate the more qualitative dimensions of human well-being and quality of life.

Peter Jackson, Walter E. L. Spiess, Farhana Sultana

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Globalization and Malnutrition: Geographical Perspectives on Its Paradoxes

Abstract

This chapter maintains that the food system is one of the most important globally embedded networks of production and consumption; its integral connections with the petroleum industry and global security confirm its significance. The chapter establishes the complex nature of mapping and measuring malnutrition. It reviews significant shifts in the incidence of malnutrition but argues that disaggregating statistics is vital to understanding trends. Changes in theorizations of the problem of malnutrition and associated solutions are then considered, including conceptual shifts from food security to food sovereignty. The global food chain is embedded in contentious political, economic, and scientific debates. Volatility in local food prices are influenced by global factors: oil prices; energy policies; dietary changes, foreign direct investments associated with “land grabs” or financial speculation. The chapter concludes with a call for a fundamental rethinking of global food provisioning to establish a more socially equitable and environmentally sustainable system.

Elizabeth Young

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Drinking Water

Abstract

This chapter examines the ongoing global struggle to supply potable drinking water to the world’s population. The chapter begins with a brief history of 20th century efforts to expand drinking water supply but argues that these efforts only resulted in partial successes. This was due to rapid demographic growth and to a dominant understanding of water scarcity as a technical problem to be solved through centralized engineering works. This paradigm is being challenged in the 21st century by an understanding of water as enmeshed in a hydrosocial cycle where social elements—including politics and economics—are intrinsic to the successful expansion of drinking water supply. Yet many issues remain, including (1) multiple kinds of water scarcity; (2) competition between different sectors; and (3) contestations surrounding cost recovery, commodification, and privatization. The chapter concludes with a discussion of water’s future governance. People are no longer waiting for drinking water supplies to expand but are contesting water’s meaning and engaging in participatory resistance to modes of water supply that undermine the human right to water.

Trevor Birkenholtz

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The Politics and Consequences of Virtual Water Export

Abstract

Virtual water is the water used or contaminated to produce a good or a service. With the large increase of export of agricultural produce during the last decades the amount of virtual water export has grown as well. Increased water contamination and water extraction for export from relative dry areas affects local ecosystems and communities. Simultaneously, the increased virtual water trade has weakened the local control over water resources by local communities, to the expense of multinational agribusiness and retailer companies. This repatterning of water control is fomented by numerous national governments, and at the same time contested by local communities. Partly as reaction to the critics on water depletion, agribusiness and retailers have created a number of water stewardship standards. Notwithstanding the possibilities for local communities to articulate their demands with these standards, until now most water stewardship standards have had little – or even negative – effects.

Jeroen Vos, Rutgerd Boelens

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Integrated Water Resources Management as a New Approach to Water Security

Abstract

Access to safe water is a worldwide problem facing three quarters of a billion people every day. The problem of access to water is not primarily due to an overall scarcity of water, but rather the unequal geographical and seasonal distribution of the water resources. The key issue at stake here is, how to make water available. The new approach presented by international institutions for improving water access is Integrated Water Resource Management. This chapter questions this new approach and highlights the depoliticizing implications.

Olivier Graefe

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Surviving as an Unequal Community: WASH for Those on the Margins

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals intend to address populations “missed” by the Millennium Development Goals for safe water and sanitation access. To capture these populations, programs need to attend to community norms for usage and the groups most marginal in those communities. Policies should include a focus on ways to eradicate socioeconomic and political marginality.

Kathleen O’Reilly

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Challenges to Food Security in a Changing World

Abstract

The next decades will see dramatic climatic changes and a pronounced population growth Asia—accompanied by the formation of huge human agglomerations, megacities—followed by increasing numbers of people in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean; North America and Oceania will experience a moderate population growth whereas the EU will face a shrinking population. Unfortunately regions with the highest population growth are those were most people are living in precarious conditions especially in SS Africa and to some extent in South East Asia. To feed the 9 billion people any effort has to be undertaken to utilize and exploit the available resources in a sustainable way and to minimize the interventions into the environment. Factors of relevance are competitive biofuel production, the extension of the Food Chain into the Mega-City household, minimizing of food losses by applying new communication systems and supporting Food Sovereignty efforts of Developing countries.

Walter E. L. Spiess

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Moral Economies of Food in the Socialist/Post-socialist World

Abstract

This chapter explains how economic activities become associated with moral understandings such as the ‘right’ way to provision food. It shows how such moral economies developed in Western Europe under the headings “liberalism” and “socialism” and gives examples of ways each is actualised in the production, exchange and consumption of food. Historical and present-day ideas about “the right way” to provision food have real-life effects, illustrated by the way fruit is traded globally. The chapter concludes with a detailed example of the socialist moral economy of food in Cuba, showing how socialist ideas about how food “should be” provisioned affect people in everyday life.

Marisa Wilson

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The Nutrition Transition in Developing Asia: Dietary Change, Drivers and Health Impacts

Abstract

This chapter reviews the likely consequences of dietary change for human health and wellbeing in Asia where a transition is occurring from diets dominated by low fat, high fibre foods to increased consumption of processed and packaged convenience foods. These foods are higher in fats, sugars and salt and are linked to increased rates of diet-related non-communicable disease. The chapter traces between-country differences and considers the drivers of dietary change including economic growth and rising incomes, the effects of urbanization and changing family size, the industrialization of food systems and the liberalization of world trade. While levels of malnutrition have declined throughout the region, rates of obesity ad overweight have increased raising challenging questions for nutrition policy planners.

Matthew Kelly

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Food Sovereignty and the Possibilities for an Equitable, Just and Sustainable Food System

Abstract

The concepts of food security and food sovereignty help explain some of the problems associated with the global economy and global agricultural production. However, these concepts are expressed differently due to the specific economic, social, political, and environmental geographies in which they exist. Any locale around the globe will face challenges in implementing and ensuring food security and food sovereignty due to a variety of issues including the changing nature of land usage, the ever-expanding commodity chains of agricultural products, the trends and whims of the global consumer, and accessibility of healthy and adequate resources for the entire population. This chapter addresses the specific challenges that one particular locale, Aotearoa New Zealand, needs to negotiate in order to achieve a more secure and sovereign food landscape. Challenges include socioeconomic disparity, cultural appropriateness, and domestic agricultural self-sufficiency, all of which are further troubled by discourses of a “pure” Aotearoa New Zealand.

Ann E. Bartos

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Food Security and Food Waste

Abstract

The chapter is aimed at providing a practical framework for a reconsideration of the themes behind the term “food security.” The analysis illustrates that since the term gained popular currency in the mid-1990s it has been restricted in focus to a few, narrow angles of research revolving around individual citizens, households, and the nation-state without consideration of global food production systems, the socio-environment that dominates food production globally. There is an urgent need for a relational understanding of food production and consumption in research on food security that understands how and why food is consumed; a biopolitical take based on understanding global mass consumption and the drivers of food capitalism, over- and -under-consumption.

Jonathan Cloke

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Titel: Eating, Drinking: Surviving
herausgegeben von: Peter Jackson
Walter E.L. Spiess
Farhana Sultana
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-42468-2
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-42467-5
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42468-2