Analysis Of Two Contrasting Approaches To Increasing Food Security In Developing Countries
According to the Rome Declaration on World Food Security (1996), food security exists when all people at all times have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food for a healthy and active life. This concept has over the years been threatened by a number of factors including but not limited to soil degradation, poor governance and water scarcity. An estimated 800 million people still go to bed hungry, 218 million of them residing in Africa. In Cameroon, close to 3. 6 million people are food insecure including 211, 000 severely insecure though with varying spatiality across the regions. Efforts for meeting the challenges presented by food insecurity in Cameroon are varied and range from the need to improve smallholder productivity to the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Paragraph one of this essay looks at improving smallholder productivity, paragraph two discusses the introduction of GMOs and the third section shows how contrasting these approaches are to increasing food security in developing countries particularly in Cameroon. This essay concludes by looking at new pathways to bridging the gap between these approaches.
Improving smallholder productivity is the key to driving food security in developing countries. According to Yengoh et al. 2010, this approach places both production choices and consumption decisions in the hands of small holder farmers and promotes practices like intercropping and agro-forestry which conserve biodiversity and represent models of agricultural sustainability. For example, in 2010, the government of Cameroon through the Agricultural Competitiveness Project (PACA) implemented in rural Cameroon increased the production of maize and rice by 112% and 109% respectively within a space of three years. It should be noted that close to 80% of Cameroons population is rural and therefore increasing agricultural productivity not only improves on food security but also income and jobs for the rural population. Though with great strides, this approach is highly contested in literature and international debates. These debates are exploring other options to increasing food security including the introduction of GMOs.
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are among the newest innovations and interventions to increasing food security across the globe. It is expected that global population will continue to rise and the world would have to increase food production by at least 70% to feed the 9 billion people by 2050. As such there is need to use technology including the use of GMOs to increase food production to meet this rising demand. The justification here is that smallholder farmers rely on local technologies and thus fail to reach their productive potential. Proponents of GMO argue that these small holder farmers need to use exogenous techniques including GMO seeds to equate supply to demand. In Cameroon for example, after the food riots of 2008, GMOs were introduced as a means to boost production in order to meet the rising demand. With GMO maize seeds like PANAR, the maize sector is thriving. The assumption here is that growing productivity drives up household income and prosperity, including household food security.
While there are benefits associated with both approaches discussed above, they seem rather contracting for two reasons; (1) the use GMOs is mostly for corporate interests and their cost turns to keep off smallholder farmers who are the poorest and most food insecure. The question is, who benefits from GMOs? (2) given the nature of the technology, new seeds have to be purchased year in year out, and usually necessitate high use of pesticides to maximise production. Most rural farmers are poor and cannot afford funds to buy these seeds or are even credit worthy to take loans from financial houses to fund GMOs. According to Ball (2016), the introduction of GMOs will displace small farmers and cause more hunger.
Whilst there may be significant successes recorded for the two approaches highlighted (improving smallholder farmers productivity and the introduction of GMOs) in increasing food security across developing countries like Cameroon, their acceptability and applicability seem to differ across time and space. It is therefore important for a holistic approach should be developed that does not only aim to increase food security at the global level but at household levels because increasing household food security translates to global food security whereas the reverse is not necessarily true.
