Springer Science and Business Media LLC

A contested issue in the international debate on food security is the role of trade in safeguarding food security at the global and national level. This paper explores how the issue of food security and trade has been discursively framed in two international organizations, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs World Trade Organization (GATT/WTO), from 1945 to 2014. We argue that there are identifiable shifts in FAO’s positions on food security and trade in the 1980s and 1990s towards trade liberalization as advocated by the WTO. The official view of the WTO secretariat and many of its member states (proponents of trade liberalization in agriculture) is that trade liberalization is both necessary and conducive for food security. The FAO has adopted this discourse. Although this is the dominant discursive framing, counter-framings of the food security - trade problem has played an important role in the deadlock of the Doha Round negotiations. We consider how this may influence the global food trading regime.

Food security attainment in Africa has been hindered by poor yields of cereals that serve both as staple and cash crops for the majority of smallholder farmers. Among the various constraints responsible for lower yields are the parasitic weed Striga, and Stemborer pests whose control has remained a challenge. The International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) with partners developed a novel conservation agricultural technology termed ‘push-pull’, based on companion cropping that effectively controls both constraints simultaneously. However, the effects of climate change threatened its expansion into drier areas where Striga is rapidly spreading. Further adaptation of the conventional (original) push-pull technology was thus achieved through identification and incorporation of drought tolerant companion crops, and the procedure termed ‘climate-smart’ push-pull technology. With maximum adoption of the adapted technology, food security in the drier agro-ecologies would be enhanced through increased cereal yields. Adoption, however, depends on how well technology dissemination is implemented. The objective of this study was to quantify the potential adoption and impact of climate-smart push-pull technology ex ante in order to plan for its wide scale dissemination. Using a sample of 898 respondents (360 in Kenya, 240 in Tanzania, 298 in Ethiopia), multinomial logit and marginal rate of return (MRR) methods were used to analyze the findings of the ex ante baseline survey. These showed a high potential for adoption of climate-smart push-pull as 87.8 % of the overall sample were willing to adopt; 92.1 % in Tanzania, 88.6 % in Ethiopia and 84.3 % in Kenya. Gender, perceptions of Striga severity, technology awareness and input market access were the most likely factors that would positively influence the decision to adopt (marginal effects 0.060, 0.010, 0.042, and 0.738 respectively). The MRR was 109.2 % for sorghum and 143.4 % for maize, implying an expected positive impact to the community should they adopt the technology.

Subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are highly vulnerable to food insecurity given their low adaptive capacity against ecological and socio-economic shocks. Therefore, food security is one of their main challenges. Participatory action research across food value chains (FVCs) can help stabilize and enhance food security by developing upgrading strategies (UPS) that enhance specific aspects of crop production, post-harvest processing, marketing, income generation, and consumption. However, prior to their widespread adoption or upscaling, UPS need holistic understandings of their potential social, ecological, economic, and institutional challenges and opportunities in target areas. This article reports the application of the “ScalA-FS” tool, which assessed the potential success of selected UPS using assessment criteria developed by agricultural scientists and local farmers in a participatory process in Tanzania. This work is embedded in a larger participatory research project conducted in semi-arid and sub-humid ecological settings of the Dodoma and Morogoro regions of Tanzania. Results from the assessment of the potential impact of the UPS differed strongly between the UPS and the social, economic and environmental assessment criteria, but only slightly between semi-arid and sub-humid regions. The positive impacts of food-securing UPS centre on productivity and income generation. Rain water harvesting, fertilizer micro-dosing, optimized weeding, and promotion of kitchen gardens were expected to have the highest impacts after implementation. The ScalA-FS ex-ante assessments provide a knowledge base about potential impacts, as well as the potential bottlenecks to address during the implementation of UPS.

Melamine, a nitrogen-rich chemical, has received much attention in recent years owing to a series of highly publicized food safety incidents. These include pet food recalls in North America in 2007 and the deaths of six infants and the illness of some 300,000 more in China in 2008 owing to the adulteration of milk, infant formula, and other milk-derived products. With contamination of human food and animal feed by melamine becoming a serious public health concern owing to its wide dissemination, there is an urgent need to understand why this scandal occurred and its consequences in depth. This review summarizes information relating to the manufacture, uses, occurrence and quantitative analysis of melamine and melamine analogues. Other sections deal with the unfolding of the melamine scandal and its aftermath, the toxicity and carcinogenicity of the compound and its analogues, interim safety measures and risk assessment.

This study examines farmers’ decisions to engage in subsistence home-gardening and its impact on food and nutrition security among farm households in Rwanda under diverse conditions. The study uses a nationally representative dataset from Rwanda from 2012, 2015, and 2018. We employ an endogenous switching regression model to jointly estimate the drivers of home-gardening participation decisions and food and nutrition security outcomes, whiles accounting for selection bias from observable and unobservable factors. We also estimate the treatment effects of home-gardening participation on dietary diversity, food consumption score, and anthropometric markers of women and children. The treatment effects are calculated at sample means and connected to market-related variables, such as land ownership, commercialization extent, and market distance. We find that having a home-garden is linked to improved dietary diversity and better nutritional outcomes. If households have restricted access to land and reside further away from marketplaces, the benefits are larger. In contrast, the benefits of home-gardening are positive and significant regardless of the level of commercialization of production. We also discover that family size, gender, education, access to land, and livestock ownership are statistically significant drivers of home-gardening participation in Rwanda. However, the amount of commercialization did not affect a household’s decision to participate in home-gardening.