Food security and sustainability: can one exist without the other?
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Achieving food security and sovereignty will require developing sustainable land management strategies to conserve and enhance ecosystem resiliency and reclaim traditional foods systems.
“Achieving both will require developing sustainable land management strategies to conserve and enhance ecosystem resiliency and reclaim traditional foods systems (Sunderland, 2011;Berry et al., 2015).”
From The Potential of Bison Restoration as an Ecological Approach to Future Tribal Food Sovereignty on the Northern Great Plains (2022) · cites this paper as Berry et al., 2015
The ‘Introducing sustainability as part of food security’ section says sustainable management of natural resources is a condition for food security and calls for maintaining ecological processes that support food production. That supports the land-management and ecosystem-conservation aspects, but our copy does not establish that reclaiming traditional food systems is required or address food sovereignty as a goal. (LLM, conf=0.84)
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Research on agro-food sustainability transitions: Where are food security and nutrition?
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- Authors
- Berry, E. M., Dernini, S., Burlingame, B., Meybeck, A., & Conforti, P.
- Affiliations
- Hebrew University of Jerusalem (IL)
- Deakin University (AU)
- Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (IT)
- Corresponding author
- Berry, Elliot M
- Venue
- Public Health Nutrition
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2015-02-16
- Volume
- 18
- Issue
- 13
- Pages
- 2293-2302
- ISSN
- 1368-9800 (ISSN-L)
- 1475-2727
- PMC
- PMC10271846
- OpenAlex
- W2153581691
- Cited by
- 491
- References
- 62
- Citations by year
- 2026: 42 · 2025: 71 · 2024: 84 · 2023: 73 · 2022: 59 · 2021: 55 · 2020: 36 · 2019: 29 · 2018: 16 · 2017: 6 · 2016: 13 · 2015: 6 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 2.92
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Public Health Nutrition (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › General Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Food Security and Socioeconomic Dynamics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Agriculture Sustainability and Environmental Impact
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Food Science › Nutrition, Health, and Society Studies
- Keywords
- food security, sustainability, sustainable diets, food availability, food access, food utilization, natural resource management, food consumption patterns, food production, nutritional well-being, food security policy
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Conservation of Natural Resources, Diet, Food Supply, Humans, Systems Theory, Global Health, Program Evaluation, Nutrition Policy, Environmental Policy
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