Need of Food Security and Climate Change
Sunil Kumar1*, Hanuman Singh Jatav2, Sukirtee3 and Pradip Tripura4
PUSA-IARI, New Delhi, 2SKNAU, Jobner, 3HAU, Hisar, 4Sharda University, Greater Noida
*Corresponding author e-mail: sunilgoyam675@gmail.com
1. Introduction
According to FAO, food security is a
situation that exists when all people,
always, have physical, social, and
economic access to enough, safe, and
nutritious food that meets their dietary
needs and food preferences for an active
and healthy life. The current food system
(production, processing, packaging,
storage, consumption, loss and waste)
feeds the great majority of world
population and supports the livelihoods of
over 1 billion people. Since 1961, food
supply per capita has increased more than
30%, accompanied by greater use of
nitrogen fertilisers (increase of about
800%) and water resources for irrigation
(increase of more than 100%). However,
an estimated 821 million people are
currently undernourished, 151 million
children under five are stunted,
613 million women and girls aged 15 to 49
suffer from iron deficiency, and 2 billion
adults are overweight or obese. The food
system is under pressure from non-climate
stressors (e.g., population and income
growth, demand for animal-sourced
products), and from climate change. These
climate and non-climate stresses are
impacting the four pillars of food security
(availability, access, utilisation, and
stability). Observed climate change is
affecting food security through increasing
temperatures, changing precipitation
patterns, and greater frequency of some
extreme events. Studies that separate out
climate change from other factors affecting
crop yields have shown that yields of some
crops(e.g., maize and wheat) in many
lower-latitude regions have been affected
negatively by observed climate changes,
while in many higher-latitude regions,
yields of some crops (e.g., maize, wheat,
and sugar beets) have been affected
positively over recent decades. Climate
change is affecting food security in
drylands, particularly those in Africa,
regions of Asia and South America. Food
security will be increasingly affected by
projected future climate change. Across
Socio-economic Pathways, global crop and
economic models projected a 1–29%
cereal price increase in 2050 due to
climate change, which would impact
consumers globally through higher food
prices. While increased CO2 is projected to
be beneficial for crop productivity at lower
temperature increases, it is projected to
lower nutritional quality (e.g., wheat
grown at 546–586 ppm CO2 has 5.9–
12.7% less protein, 3.7–6.5% less zinc,
and 5.2–7.5% less iron). Distributions of
pests and diseases will change, affecting
production negatively in many regions.
About 21–37% of total greenhouse gas
(GHG) emissions are attributable to the
food system. These are from agriculture
and land use, storage, packaging,
processing, and consumption. This
estimate includes emissions of 9–14%
from crop and livestock activities within
the farm gate and 5–14% from land use
and land-use change including
deforestation and peatland degradation, 5–
10% is from supply chain activities. This
estimate includes GHG emissions from
food loss and waste.
2. Effects of Climate Change
2.1 Food Security: Climate change is
projected to negatively impact the four
pillars of food security – availability,
access, utilisation and stability and their
interactions. Low-income producers and
consumers are likely to be most affected
because of a lack of resources to invest in
adaptation and diversification measures.
Climate change impacts differ among
diverse social groups depending on factors
such as age, ethnicity, ability/disability,
sexual orientation, gender, wealth, and
class. Poverty, along with socio-economic
and political marginalisation, cumulatively
put women, children and the elderly in a
disadvantaged position in coping with the
adverse impacts of the changing climate.
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The contextual vulnerability of women is
higher due to their differentiated relative
power, roles, and responsibilities at the
household and community. They often
have a higher reliance on subsistence
agriculture, which will be severely
impacted by climate change. Decreased
yields can impact nutrient intake of the
poor by decreasing supplies of highly
nutritious crops and by promoting adaptive
behaviours that may substitute crops that
are resilient but less nutritious.
To reach the temperature goal put
forward in the Paris Agreement of limiting
warming to well below 2°C, and pursuing
efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C,
representatives from 196 countries signed
the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC) Paris Agreement (UNFCCC
2015) in December 2015. The Agreement
put forward a temperature target of
limiting warming to well below 2°C, and
pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C.
Under the Paris Agreement, Parties are
expected to put forward their best efforts
through nationally determined
contributions (NDCs) and to strengthen
these efforts in the years ahead.
2.2 Crop Production: The impacts of
climate change on crop production and
related variables analysis found that
climate change between 1981 and 2010
has decreased global mean yields of maize,
wheat, and soybeans by 4.1, 1.8 and 4.5%,
respectively, relative to pre-industrial
climate, even when CO2 fertilisation and
agronomic adjustments are considered. For
rice, no significant impacts were detected.
Dryland settlements are perceived as
vulnerable to climate change about food
security, particularly in developing
countries; such areas are known to have
low capacities to cope effectively with
decreasing crop yields. This is of concern
because drylands constitute over 40% of
the earth’s land area and are home
to 2.5 billion people.
2.3 Livestock Production Systems:
Livestock systems are impacted by climate
change mainly through increasing
temperatures and precipitation variation, as
well as atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2)
concentration and a combination of these
factors. Temperature affects most of the
critical factors of livestock production,
such as water availability, animal
production and reproduction, and animal
health (mostly through heat stress).
Livestock diseases are mostly affected by
increases in temperature and precipitation
variation. Impacts of climate change on
livestock productivity, particularly of
mixed and extensive systems, are strongly
linked to impacts on rangelands and
pastures, which include the effects of
increasing CO2 on their biomass and
nutritional quality. This is critical
considering the very large areas concerned
and the number of vulnerable people
affected. Pasture quality and quantity are
mainly affected through increases in
temperature and CO2, and precipitation
variation.
2.4 Diseases and Pests: Climate change is
changing the dynamics of pests and
diseases of both crops and livestock. The
nature and magnitude of future changes is
likely to depend on local agroecological
and management context. This is because
of the many biological and ecological
mechanisms by which climate change can
affect the distribution, population size, and
impacts of pests and diseases on food
production. These mechanisms include
changes in host susceptibility due to CO2
concentration effects on crop composition
and climate stresses; changes in the
biology of pests and diseases or their
vectors (e.g., more generational cycles,
changes in selection pressure driving
evolution); mismatches in timing between
pests or vectors and their ‘natural
enemies’; changes in survival or
persistence of pests or disease pathogens
(e.g., changes in crop architecture driven
by CO2 fertilisation and increased
temperature, providing a more favourable
environment for persistence of pathogens
like fungi), and changes in pest
distributions as their ‘climate envelopes’
shift.
2.5 Smallholder Farming Systems: Farm
households in the developing world often
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rely on a complex mix of crops, livestock,
aquaculture, and non-agricultural activities
for their livelihoods. Across the world,
smallholder farmers are considered to be
disproportionately vulnerable to climate
change because changes in temperature,
rainfall and the frequency or intensity of
extreme weather events directly affect
their crop and animal productivity as well
as their household’s food security, income
and well-being. Smallholder farming
systems have been recognised as highly
vulnerable to climate change because they
are highly dependent on agriculture and
livestock for their livelihood.
2.6 Food Safety and Human Health:
Climate change can influence food safety
through changing the population dynamics
of contaminating organisms due to, for
example, changes in temperature and
precipitation patterns, humidity, increased
frequency and intensity of extreme
Climate change and food security: risk and recommendations
3.1 Reduce income inequality and
increase social justice: Wealth inequities,
social injustice, and social exclusion
prevent individuals and societies from
developing properly. These inequities are
major underlying factors that drive the
very high rates of food insecurity, poor
physical and mental health, and the
environmental destruction of our planet.
For this reason, it is essential to support
the development, implementation, and
evaluation of economic, social, and
cultural policies that close the huge gaps
between the wealthiest and the poorest
individuals across the globe.
3.2 Promote sustainable agriculture:
Promote sustainable agriculture
technologies and practices that minimize
agriculture’s carbon footprint and its
impact on natural resources, including soil
weather events, and changes in
contaminant transport pathways. Changes
in food and farming systems, for example,
intensification to maintain supply under
climate change, may also increase
vulnerabilities as the climate changes.
Climate-related changes in the biology of
contaminating organisms include changing
the activity of mycotoxin-producing fungi,
changing the activity of microorganisms in
aquatic food chains that cause disease and
increasingly heavy rainfall and floods
causing contamination of pastures with
enteric microbes (like Salmonella) that can
enter the human food chain.
3. Recommendations
There is no doubt that food insecurity is
affected by and strongly affects both the
health of human beings and the health and
survival of our planet for future
generations.
and water. Agriculture releases more
greenhouse gases than all forms of
transportation combined. Methane is a
greenhouse gas released in large amounts
from large-scale commercial cereal
agriculture (e.g., rice) and animal
husbandry, especially cattle. Large-scale
commercial agriculture that decimates
tropical forests also leads to massive
release of carbon by destroying a major
treebased “carbon sink”. Approximately
one-third of all food grown is lost or
wasted. Therefore, reducing food losses
and waste can significantly reduce the
impact of food production on the earth’s
ecosystems while we need to plan on
making food available to 2.5 billion
additional individuals between now and
2050.
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3.3 Minimize food waste: Support policies Governments should consider policies and
that minimize food waste. In developed programs that optimize the nutrition of
countries, most food waste happens as a their populations throughout the life
result of food left unconsumed at home, in course, including gestation, infancy, early
restaurants, or in supermarkets. This childhood, and the adolescent period.
means that in high-income nations,
consumers have the power to significantly Conclusion
reduce food waste by modifying their own In conclusion, food insecurity is a major
eating behaviours and through their social and environmental disruptor with
collective power to demand supermarkets serious repercussions for the health and
and eating venues to disclose and take future sustainability of our planet.
measures to reduce food losses. In Improved food security governance based
contrast, in low-income countries, most on sound, equitable, and sustainable food
food losses occur between the farm and the systems that benefit from modern
markets as a result of poor agricultural information technologies is essential for all
practices, as well as poor food storage and countries to be able to meet the food
food distribution systems, including requirements.
transportation. Food losses can be
substantially reduced by improving the
efficiency of agricultural practices through
lessons learned from the large-scale
commercial and the smaller scale organic
farming sectors. The evolution of organic
farming offers lessons as to how to
improve the nutritional quality of the soil
and to conserve water by using cover
crops, mulch, and compost.
3.4 Nutrition policy: Governments should
consider removing subsidies and
addressing food price policies that foster
the production and consumption of highly
energy-dense diets of very low nutritional
value and of sugar-sweetened beverages at
the expense of healthy, nutrient-dense diets
based on a variety of fruit, vegetables,
legumes, nuts, seeds, whole grains, and
healthy animal protein sources including
fish. Governments should issue and
enforce food-labeling legislation that leads
to the development of clear, transparent,
consumer-friendly labels that provide
information on the nutritional value, level
of processing, and carbon footprint of
foods and beverages purchased at
supermarkets or consumed at restaurants
and other eating venues. Food labels
should also make a clear distinction
between “best by” and “expiration” dates
to prevent consumers from discarding
products based on the “best by” date,
which is an indicator of peak freshness and
not of spoilage of the product.

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