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Potential of breadfruit cultivation to contribute to climate-resilient low latitude food systems

Factors associated with dietary diversity among pregnant women in the western hill region of Nepal: A community based cross-sectional study

Food security and small holder farming in Pacific Island countries and territories: A scoping review

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A meta-analysis of the adoption of agricultural technology in Sub-Saharan Africa

Climate smart agriculture and global food-crop production

A novel intervention combining supplementary food and infection control measures to improve birth outcomes in undernourished pregnant women in Sierra Leone: A randomized, controlled clinical effectiveness trial

Does agricultural cooperative membership impact technical efficiency of maize production in Nigeria: An analysis correcting for biases from observed and unobserved attributes

Saltwater intrusion and climate change impact on coastal agriculture

Uncontained spread of Fusarium wilt of banana threatens African food security

Estimating impact of food choices on life expectancy: A modeling study

Maximising sustainable nutrient production from coupled fisheries-aquaculture systems

Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO 2 emissions this century

Assessment of drinking water access and household water insecurity: A cross sectional study in three rural communities of the Menoua division, West Cameroon

Levels of heavy metals in soil and vegetables and associated health risks in Mojo area, Ethiopia

Combining viral genetic and animal mobility network data to unravel peste des petits ruminants transmission dynamics in West Africa

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Exploring food security as a multidimensional topic: twenty years of scientific publications and recent developments

• Open access
• Published: 09 August 2022
• Volume 57 , pages 2739–2758, ( 2023 )

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• Maria Stella Righettini 1 &
• Elisa Bordin   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0308-1742 2  

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The scientific literature dealing with food security is vast and fragmented, making it difficult to understand the state of the art and potential development of scientific research on a central theme within sustainable development.

The current article, starting from some milestone publications during the 1980s and 1990s about food poverty and good nutrition programmes, sets out the quantitative and qualitative aspects of a vast scientific production that could generate future food security research. It offers an overview of the topics that characterize the theoretical and empirical dimensions of food security, maps the state of the art, and highlights trends in publications’ ascending and descending themes. To this end the paper applies quantitative/qualitative methods to analyse more than 20,000 scientific articles published in Scopus between 2000 and 2020.

Evidence suggests the need to find more robust links between micro studies on food safety and nutrition poverty and macro changes in food security, such as the impact of climate change on agricultural production and global food crises. However, the potential inherent in the extensive and multidisciplinary research on food safety encounters limitations, particularly the difficulty of theoretically and empirically connecting the global and regional dimensions of change (crisis) with meso (policy) and micro (individual behaviour) dimensions.

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1 Introduction

Food insecurity is a timely and multidimensional problem positioned at the crossroads between the right to food and health in developing and rich, industrialized countries. However, it is unclear how scientific production reflects this multidimensionality overall and whether the recent COVID-19 pandemic has shed new light on the issues at stake. The analysis presented in this article aims to give a systematic review and meta-analysis of the vast amount of scientific food security research produced over the past twenty years. This work aims to offer an overview of the topics that characterize food security’s theoretical and empirical dimensions, map state of the art, and highlight trends in scientific publications’ ascending and descending themes. A systematic literature review sets out quantitative and qualitative aspects which could generate future food security research.

Since the 1960s, with the approval of precursor USA federal anti-poverty programs (Esobi et al. 2021 ; Nestle 2019 ; Swann 2017 ), interest in preventing the adverse effects of poverty has broadened and deepened scientific interest in the field of how to guarantee food access to the neediest people. Since then, various framings, reflecting differences in meaning and problem formulation and coming from different territorial and disciplinary perspectives, have highlighted the contested relationship between social, economic, and environmental circumstances to food access and nutrition experiences (Dowler and O’Connor 2012 ). In the 1960s, creating the World Food Program (WFP) was a prominent example of the institutionalization of the ‘food for development’ framework. The food crisis of 1972–74 marked a turning point in food security insurance schemes and led to better coordination between donor countries. Then, the first official mention of food security was in the United Nations report presented at the World Food Conference in 1974 (McKeon 2014 ). In the 1980s and 1990s, food security was broadened to include physical and economic access to food and consider women’s role in poverty alleviation. Therefore, what has come to be termed food security and nutrition security has been controversial, reflecting multiple, not always coordinated, governmental policies and multifaceted theoretical and research fields.

The most used definition of food security was developed during the 1996 World Food Summit organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) (Mechlem 2004 ). It resembles the definition of the right to food (Maxwell and Smith 1992 ; Smith et al. 1993 ). Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life (FAO 2003). Food security has become a priority focus for donor states and cooperation with developing countries to reduce poverty and systemic environmental, economic, and social causes of hunger. It has five conceptual dimensions: nutritional status, utilization, accessibility, availability, and stability (Gross et al. 2000). However, unlike food security, nutrition security refers only to the individual’s (mal)nutritional status due to diet regime, food intake, and health status (Gross et al. 2000).

Academic research developed many approaches to food insecurity during the 1980s and 1990s. The right-to-food-based approach to food security suggests that human dignity, rights acknowledgment, transparency, government accountability, citizens’ empowerment, food, and wellbeing should be considered in welfare programs. The right-to-food approach required governments to adopt specific programs and meet precise obligations to combat poverty (Maxwell 1996 ). The right to food was not merely a means to achieve food security; rather, it was seen as a broader, more encompassing, and distinct objective. The seminal works of Amartya Sen on poverty during the 1980s (Sen 1980 , 1981 , 1982 ) raised controversy over nutritional norms and intensified the debate on the interrelations between food access and poverty reduction interventions. Food security is seen as an integral part of social security, understood as the “prevention by social means, of a deficient standard of living irrespectively of whether these are the results of chronic deprivation or temporary adversity” (Burgess and Stern 1991 :4). We should point out that this debate regarded achieving food security in the poorest developing countries and the richest developed ones, where obesity and malnutrition among low-income people increased. The multifaceted nature of food security is entrenched in its measurement complexity (in terms of life expectancy or income). To understand the causes of deprivation and fragility associated with the lives of increasing portions of the population, food security scholars have striven to assess the validity of tools measuring food safety/insecurity and provide valid indications and suggestions to policymakers.

In the 2000 Plan for Action regarding food and diet in Europe, the World Health Organization (WHO) argued that nutrition security in the 21st century depends on production that meets dietary needs and enables equal access to appropriate food while controlling misleading promotional messages (Carlson et al. 1999 ). In addition, food prices, policies, and education can significantly reduce malnutrition risks (Wekerle 2004 ).

Even though rising poverty and hunger levels have been a concern for many countries, acknowledgment and quantification of hunger have been disputed and hindered by the lack of an accepted definition and measure of food security. Before food security can be measured, the potential target of the intervention must be identified.

The first food security measure based on household experiences at the individual level was developed in 1990 by Radimer and colleagues ( 1992 ) and based on a 12-item questionnaire. The ‘hunger index’ was developed through qualitative interviews with women from low-income households (Kendall, Olson, and Frongillo 1995 ). Since 1992, the literature has indicated that food security measurements may vary in their performance across different population groups and cultures and that good practice and policy instruments are difficult to transfer across different contexts (Kendall, Olson, and Frongillo 1995 ; Leyna et al. 2008 ; Radimer and Radimer 2002 ; Zerafati Shoae et al. 2007 ). One of the main problems in rolling out food security interventions is that it is not easy to identify the target (households below the poverty line) (Carlson et al. 1999 ). Although such identification usually lacks accuracy, generalized subsidies (food stamps) – on commodities consumed by both the rich and the poor – have often been an attractive option for policymakers (Besley and Kanbur 1988 ).

The more recent Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), focuses on food consumption experience, living conditions, and individual contexts (Cafiero et al. 2018 ). It consists of eight dimensions regarding people’s access to adequate food, and it is based on various kinds of population surveys. Its global reference scale is based on results from the application of the FIES survey module in countries covered by the Gallup World Poll in 2014, 2015, and 2016. In addition, food insecurity prevalence rates allow comparison between different countries, and the FIES is designed to measure unobservable traits such as aptitude/intelligence, personality, and a broad range of social psychology- and health-related conditions (Cafiero et al. 2018 ).

The food security issue has gained greater cross-cutting relevance in academic and policy circles in connection to public health issues related to the economic and social crises raised by the COVID-19 pandemic (Ahn and Norwood 2020 ; Arouna et al. 2020 ; Béné 2020 ; Cable et al. 2021 ; Mishra and Rampal 2020 ; Moseley and Battersby 2020 ; O’Hara and Toussaint 2021). Economic and social stresses generated by the pandemic led to the formulation of renewed public interventions in response to food insecurity in developing and rich countries.

The literature review presented in the following sections aims to fill a gap in our knowledge of the vast amount of scientific food security research produced, its theoretical and research dimensions, and trends in the last twenty years. Furthermore, the fully electronic search intends to illustrate the main lines of scientific interest within the topic and indicate the most transversal issues and promising areas of scientific interaction. Therefore, this article is organized as follows.

Section  2 illustrates the research questions and methods adopted to build the dataset of articles addressing food security. Section  3 presents research results regarding publications over time and across scientific areas. Section  4 describes the most recurrent topics and clusters of issues addressed by the food security literature. Section  5 shows their inter-relations and evolution over time. Section  6 presents an in-depth analysis of the thematic cluster on domestic programs. Section  7 shows the impact of COVID-19 in the thematic focus of publications. Finally, Section  8 discusses the main findings and limits of the meta-analysis and evaluates the contribution of the food security literature to unlocking the future research potential of transboundary policies and governance.

2 Research questions and methods

This article aims to answer the three main research questions: in a systematic literature review, what are the main thematic dimensions linked to the issue of food security? How do these dimensions evolve, and how do they relate? Furthermore, does the literature highlight new dimensions of the problem concerning the COVID-19 pandemic?

To achieve its scope, this article combines bibliographic analysis, semi-automatic content analysis, and topic detection to explore the literature on food security. Following research domain analysis (RDA), applied to all publications in a given research domain (Janssen 2007 ; Janssen et al. 2006 ; Janssen and Ostrom 2006 ), we describe multiple strands of literature, in particular interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral ones, to highlight dimensions and research agendas linked to the food security theme. An overview of the scholarly production and its evolution is essential to account for its achievements and gaps and identify the way forward.

There is not a comprehensive literature review on food security so far, but only partial reviews (Candel 2014 ; Chan et al. 2006 ; Haddad et al. 1996 ; Nosratabadi et al. 2020 ; Thompson et al. 2010 ). Therefore, our objective is to conduct an exploratory literature review investigating the multidisciplinary approaches to the issue. Thus, when choosing the most appropriate data source to construct the database of articles, the comprehensiveness of content coverage was the most important criterion to evaluate. Bibliographic databases (DBs) are the leading providers of publication metadata and bibliometric indicators (Pranckute 2021 ). Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) are widely acknowledged as the two most comprehensive DBs (see Pranckute 2021 for a comprehensive review of the studies). However, multiple studies confirmed that Scopus has a more comprehensive overall coverage than WoS. In addition, while the content of the two databases is generally overlapping, Scopus indexes a more significant number of unique sources not covered by WoS, though this variation differs across specific subject fields (Pranckute 2021 ). Hence, we deemed Scopus the most appropriate data source for our literature review given its greater comprehensiveness.

To conduct our bibliometric analysis, we started by compiling a list of words and concepts related to food security based on seminal works in the literature and the authors’ knowledge of the topic. The list included the following terms: food security, food insecurity, food aid, food poverty, nutrition quality, food solidarity, and food stamps. Subsequently, we compiled a list of possible combinations of these terms using Boolean operators, and we used them as search strings to explore the title, abstract, or keywords of publications within the Scopus database. The choice of “food security” (in quotation marks) as a keyword resulted from an iterative process that involved multiple searches using all the compiled combinations and discussions among the authors. As a result, this keyword returned the highest number of articles (over 20,000 results, as opposed to less than 10,000 results for other combinations). Moreover, the articles citing the term “food security” also covered all the other terms and combinations, while the reverse was not valid. Hence, we verified that the concept of “food security” is the most comprehensive and that it contains other relevant frames, such as food poverty, nutrition poverty, and, to a lesser extent, food safety.

Due to the database consistency and the marked increase in the number of articles per year, we decided to focus on literature published during the last two decades, thus analyzing the articles produced between 2000 and 2020. Furthermore, we decided to analyze separately the literature published between January and July 2021 (the current year) to avoid a misinterpretation of the results. The 2021 literature is relevant for identifying a variation in themes and focuses after the COVID-19 pandemic.

A first search using the selected keywords returned 34,931 documents. To narrow the analysis, we decided to focus the search on peer-reviewed articles written in English, as they constitute the core of the international literature. In addition, we cleaned the resulting database by removing articles with no abstract and duplicates. To select which duplicate would be kept in the database, we respected the following criteria: the most recent, the longest abstract, and correct formatting. The final database contained 21,574 articles. For the first fundamental analysis of the database, we used the automatic analyses provided by Scopus and complemented them with analyses made through Microsoft Excel. The aim was to list the academic journals, countries, and scientific areas of the articles published.

The second step of the analysis focused on the thematic dimensions covered in the food security literature. We performed a topic detection on the articles’ abstracts to achieve this aim, using automatic content analysis. Automatic and semi-automatic content analyses are evolving trends in the literature. These methods exploit algorithms and software to apply statistical analysis to textual data in electronic format (Sbalchiero 2018 ). They automate the process of data encoding and analysis, thus combining the advantage of timesaving with the possibility to investigate the main topics and issues discussed in the literature without any prior theoretical or analytical constraints (Sbalchiero and Eder 2020 ; Righettini and Lizzi 2021 ). However, while their application to the analysis of social media and political documents is growing, they remain marginal in literature reviews. Still, this kind of analysis allows researchers to overcome the biases involved in literature reviews when the authors select and analyze articles. In many cases, the selection criteria for the articles are not specified, so there is a risk that essential studies will be left out, and a self-reinforcing mechanism will be perpetuated around a limited number of articles. Conversely, the automatic and semi-automatic analysis considers the whole body of literature, thus allowing researchers to explore the variety of theoretical frameworks and methodologies that unravel undetected patterns.

Topic detection is a text mining technique that allows detecting these patterns in large document corpora and classifying them as recurring topics and themes. The “latent” topics within the corpus’ documents are unveiled through algorithms that use statistical modeling and programming language to analyze the correlation among terms, i.e., words or phrases (El-Taliawi et al. 2021 ). This study employs Reinert’s method (Reinert 1990 , 2001 ), which uses the R-based software Iramuteq to analyze “the co-occurrences of words as they appear in portions of text, and thereby identify lexical worlds, or semantic classes” (Sbalchiero 2018 , p. 202). This method automatically performs most of the operations required to prepare the corpora (lemmatization, spelling harmonization, etc.). It allows for saving time in the process and increasing precision. Moreover, it does not require specifying the number of topics a priori (Sbalchiero and Eder 2020 ). Thus, it appears more fitted for explorative analysis of the literature we aim to do in this study.

The algorithm implemented by Iramuteq constructs a contingency matrix of words-per-abstract based on the co-occurrences of words in each abstract. It then uses a clustering procedure that hierarchically identifies the “factors (clusters) that best represent a lexical world from the distance of the chi-square between the classes” (Sbalchiero 2018 , p. 203). Pearson’s chi-square test (statistical hypothesis test) allows measuring the strength of association between the terms and topics. The greater the Pearson’s chi-square, the more likely the hypothesis of dependence between terms and topic (Carvalho et al. 2020 ). Co-occurrences of words are analyzed in such a way as to understand their relationships in the contexts of scientific discourse and to construct vocabularies of co-occurring words that are specific to each semantic class. Through this analysis, we were able to identify the different thematic dimensions discussed in the literature and the topics covered, and the relationships among different clusters. This analysis allowed us to answer the first research question.

In a subsequent step, we used the semi-automatic text analysis to measure the association grade between the topics and publication year variable. Again, a positive difference, and a threshold of significance set at chi-square, indicated that a topic had received greater attention in a particular year. Hence, by looking at the grade of association between year and clusters, we were able to determine the evolution of the topics over time and, thus, answer the second research question.

To strengthen these analyses, we also studied the keywords authors had listed in the articles. The keywords analysis helped identify the most studied issues related to food security and geographic focuses.

Finally, we investigated the articles published in Scopus between January 2021 and July 11, 2021 (the last search conducted) using the same procedure applied to the main corpus. After the cleaning procedure, the 2021 database consisted of 2,533 articles (out of 3,672 documents resulting from the search). As for the main corpus, we performed the analysis using both Microsoft Excel and Iramuteq software. However, in this case, the application of Reinert’s ( 1983 ) method did not result in a statistically significant analysis, as the percentage of text segments retained (69.16%) was lower than the minimum retention indicated by the literature (70 – 75%). Still, it was possible to use the analysis to identify new topics and trends in the literature on food security after the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the analysis of the keywords complemented this analysis and allowed us to answer the third research question.

Due to the high number of articles included in the dataset, this review did not aim to investigate the specific content of articles. Instead, it aimed to identify the main trends in the literature and the topics that constitute the core of the theoretical and methodological debate around food security.

3 Publications over time and across scientific areas

The present section describes some characteristics of the dataset analyzed, namely the corpus dimension, science areas, and journals most interested in food security, as well as how food security articles published between 2000 and 2020 developed over time.

Table  1 shows a first analysis of the database on food security. Between 2000 and 2020, 21,574 articles were published in English in 3,817 different journals. The high number of both articles and journals is representative of the attention that this topic has received over the last two decades and the multiple angles adopted for its analysis. The multidisciplinary of the literature is also evident in the distribution among different scientific areas. Agricultural and biological science (ABS) is the most prominent subject area, closely followed by social sciences (SS) and environmental science (ES). An important percentage of articles also deals with medicine and health (MH) and economics (E). Therefore, we can affirm that the issue of food security cuts across disciplinary boundaries. Authors have analyzed the issue from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives.

It is also worth noting that geographically, the publications are mainly concentrated in the Anglo-Saxon countries, with U.S. academia producing almost 30% of the literature. Other than the obvious issue of the English language, the strong preponderance of articles published by British and U.S. universities can be linked to the long tradition of these countries in food security and food assistance programs and evaluation. The automatic analyses performed by the Scopus website allowed us to identify the most relevant scientific areas explored in each country. Both the USA and UK distribute their production rather evenly among different scientific areas (USA: 18.3% ABS, 17.7% SS, 14.9% ES, 13.3% MH; UK: 21.4% ABS, 18.9% ES, 18.5% SS).

China represents an exception to the English-speaking countries, being the third most prolific producer. China has seen a rapid increase in articles published since 2009, with more than half of the studies focusing on ES and ABS. This timing in Chinese scientific production may be due both to the first major food security policy document released by the Chinese central government in 2004 to combat food poverty (Ghose 2014 ) and the effects of the global food crisis after the global increase in food prices in 2007. The instability was due to smaller amounts of food being available for human consumption because farmers devoted more of their crops to biofuel production in the USA and Europe (Bohstedt 2016 ).

As shown in Fig.  1 , the number of articles published every year has strongly and steadily increased since the beginning of the century, with rapid growth in the last decade. The number of publications grew from 156 to 2,000 to 658 in 2010 to over 3,500 in 2020. The growth index represented in Fig.  2 (calculated as [(PresentValue – Past Value)/PastValue] *100) shows more clearly a substantial increase in 2006 (global food crisis) and two peaks in 2013 (effects of the second financial crisis) and 2020 (COVID-19 crisis). These figures show how the food security issue has been gaining importance in the literature over time, a trend confirmed by the number of articles published in 2021. In addition, they confirm the critical link between economic and social crises and food security. These crises increase food insecurity, thus sparking new debates and studies on the issue of food security.

Articles on food security published per year (2000–2020)

Yearly growth index of articles on food security (2000–2020)

The attention to food security observed in Fig.  2 gained momentum due to a sharp rise in alimentary prices in 2006 and 2013. The first rise was caused by global financial speculation in agricultural commodities futures (McKeon 2014 ). Moreover, the food crisis that broke out between 2007 and 2008 focused the interest of a broad international scientific debate on agricultural policies, the gaps between the north and the southern countries, and the adequacy of global food security governance’s primary tool: food aids. The second momentum of interest for food insecurity was in 2013. It converges with the new rise in food prices and a growing interest in the social movements and civil society organizations’ role in mitigating the social and health consequences of financial speculation and global food market dynamics on local communities. Finally, from 2019 onwards, the scientific literature has increased interest in the connections between the unstoppable growth of food prices, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic on food security. The scientific articles concern, among the others, the challenges posed by climate change on the resilience of local agricultural systems, and finally, the negative impact of policies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic on poverty and the growing fragility of individuals and families in accessing quality food both in developed and developing countries and regions.

As observed in Section  2 , the issue of food security results in many different journals and from various perspectives. The plurality of approaches to the problem is also evident in ranking the journals that have published the most articles. As we can see in Table  2 , the ten most active journals publish literature which is either interdisciplinary or pertaining to different scientific areas. It is interesting to observe that the first journal is Sustainability , thus reflecting the strong link between the issue of food security and sustainability, in particular with regard to the environmental and social aspects of the latter. In addition, food security has a dedicated journal, thus confirming once again its importance in the academic world.

4 Food security thematic dimensions

After mapping publications on food security, we can observe the empirical data that allow us to answer the first research question:

RQ1: What are the main thematic dimensions linked to the theme of food security?

A first attempt to identify the most recurrent issues analyzed by the food security literature can be made by looking at the keywords proposed by the authors, which outline the focus of the articles. As we can see from Table  3 , the focus proposed by the keywords is rather composite. The presence of climate change as the second most frequently used keyword is significant of the importance that adaptation (n. 13), resilience to climate change (n. 15), and the sustainability (n. 6) of food systems play in the academic discourse. Food production, represented by words such as agriculture (n. 4), rice (n. 11), and maize (n. 16), is also an important element of food security. It is also important to note the countries that appear as keywords and, thus, represent the main geographical focuses of the literature. The African continent is represented by three keywords: Africa (n. 8), sub-Saharan Africa (n. 12), and Ethiopia (n. 14). The strong presence of Africa in the literature can be linked to both the problem of food security in the continent and the FAO’s strong focus on the region. It is also interesting to observe that China (n.9) is the first country to appear as a keyword. This finding is in line with the fact that China is among the most prolific publishers and among the most studied countries, alongside Africa and India.

After a first analysis of the most discussed topics in the literature, we proceed to the analysis of the thematic clusters. The application of Reinert’s ( 1983 ) method to the corpus of food security articles resulted in a division into six thematic clusters that represent six different focuses of the literature. As shown in Fig.  3 , the division into clusters follows a hierarchical procedure which divides the texts based on their semantic classes, until the homogeneity of the texts makes a further division impossible. Hence, we can observe a first cluster (domestic programs for diet) isolated from a second macro-cluster that unfolds in three separate sub-clusters (agriculture and biotechnology; research approaches and policy; climate impact).

Descending hierarchy of thematic clusters in the food security literature (2000–2020)

Table  4 shows the percentage of texts that belong to each cluster and the words that best characterize it. The titles were assigned to each cluster by the authors based on the analysis of the content, to simplify their identification.

Below is a short description of the content of each cluster and its perspective on food security:

Cluster 1: “Domestic programs for diet quality” is the biggest thematic cluster in the literature. Moreover, as shown in Fig.  3 , this cluster stands as a separate stream of the literature. It deals with food security programs and diet quality, linking food security to household food security. It focuses on programs designed to secure a good dietary intake, with a specific focus on low-income Footnote 1 families, gender ( woman, female) , and schools . The American Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) receives considerable attention within this cluster, as one of the oldest and broadest national food security programs. Hence, food security is analyzed in its dimension related to nutritional quality ( nutritional status, dietary diversity) , observing the impact of different factors ( income, education, age) on food insecurity at the individual level. The measurement of food insecurity is central in this cluster, as highlighted by words such as survey, score, questionnaire , and interview . Through these methods, the literature aims to measure the impact of food security programs in contrasting food insecurity and improving the nutritional status of the participants. Due to its size and its separateness from the rest of the literature, we analyze this cluster in greater depth in the next section.

Cluster 2: “Agriculture” focuses specifically on agricultural production, investigating the influence of different factors on food production. Specifically, it observes the impact of climatic events ( temperature, season, rainfall ) and agricultural practices ( fertilizers, manure, experiment) on the yield productivity of different crops ( maize, wheat, rice, grains). The approach to food security in this cluster is purely scientific, and it aims to increase and improve food production to guarantee access to food.

Cluster 3: “Bio-technology” is closely related to Cluster 4, as it deals with the genetic and biological aspects of food and its production. The analysis focuses on the genetic modification of plants and species to improve their resistance and tolerance to pathogens and external stress. The approach is purely scientific, and it focuses on improving the resistance of food production to the impact of climate change.

Cluster 4: “Climate impact” relates to a dimension of global demand for food production , mostly related to the impact of climate change and population growth . Agricultural production is essential for ensuring food security and global access to food. However, it is facing challenges on two fronts. On the one hand, it needs to deal with the impact of climate change and how it threatens productivity, biodiversity , and water resources. On the other, it is challenged by changes in land use , both under the pressure of urbanization and about land conversion for producing energy , in the form of biofuel. Thus, this cluster focuses on improving food security through the adoption of strategies that mainly aim to strengthen the resilience, productivity, and sustainability of food production.

Cluster 5: “Research approaches” is a rather composite cluster which includes the different frameworks and perspectives adopted by the food security literature. The approaches and methodologies are very diverse, ranging from political discussions and debates (agenda, discourse) , to social and justice perspectives ( movement, human rights) , to food systems and food sovereignty ( governance). It uses both empirical case studies and theoretical approaches ( theory) to discuss the issue and concept of food security. The diversity of approaches reflects the multidisciplinarity of the literature, as previously observed.

Cluster 6: “Policy” deals with the strategies and policies that governments adopt for food security and adaptation . Agricultural policies are central in this cluster, with natural resources and land management as essential elements of adaptation strategies and farmers’ support. The cluster analyses all phases involved in the policy process, examining the definition of an agenda , the decision-making process, the planning of a strategy , the identification of tools , and the adoption phase, which includes the implementation, strengthening , and building of capacities. Participatory practices, as well as technology and innovation , receive much attention within the cluster. Thus, this cluster focuses on the improvement of food security through the adoption of strategies that mainly aim at strengthening the resilience, productivity, and sustainability of food production.

It is interesting to observe the role “poverty” plays in the food security literature. While it is one of the most used keywords listed by authors, it does not appear as a frequent word in any clusters (Cluster 2 is the one in which it first appears, n. 223). This difference in importance could be that while poverty is considered a central issue in the food security literature, the articles focus on the causes, effects, and different dimensions of poverty, rather than on poverty itself. Causes and effects are treated in different clusters within the literature. Cluster 2 deals with climate change’s impact on the increasing number of people falling into poverty globally. Cluster 6 and, to a lesser extent, Cluster 5 deal with its effects through programs that aim to alleviate food and nutrition poverty.

5 Evolution over time and relation between thematic dimensions

After the analysis of the thematic clusters and their evolution over time, we can answer the second research question:

RQ2: How do these dimensions evolve, and how do they relate?

Figure  4 shows the evolution over time of the different thematic clusters. We can see a relatively stable trend in the evolution of the clusters.

Refer to Sect. 2 for the general meaning of the chi-square value. In the temporal evolution of topics, Pearson’s chi-square indicates the association between the term “year_year of publication” (e.g., “year_2020”) related to each article and the topics. A positive value in the graph suggests over-representation of a topic in a specific year (highly discussed in the literature), while negative values indicate under-representation of the topic in that year (seldomly discussed in the literature)

Figure compiled by authors .

Still, we can observe how the “biotechnology” cluster has started to receive increased attention in the past five years, with a growing trend. Likewise, the “domestic programs for diet quality” cluster saw a spike in attention between 2006 and 2007. This increase is likely to be linked to the global food crisis caused by a shift in land use, from food production for human consumption to biomass production for biofuel. The drop-in food production caused a spike in the prices and a consequent increase in food insecurity, thus putting programs to improve food security high on the policy and scholarly agenda.

The food security literature has seen multiple topics co-exist in the last two decades. The “policy” cluster has had the most stable presence in the literature, while other clusters have seen fluctuating trends. It is worth noting that the “diet quality” cluster received considerable attention in 2006 – 2007 and that a growing strand of literature focuses on the technological and biological aspects of food production for food security.

The Cartesian planes (Fig.  5 ) reflect the relationships between different clusters and among the most frequent words belonging to the clusters themselves. The zero value on the X-axis allows for distinguishing between topics that show a positive correlation among terms and topics that tend to be more isolated. Clusters with a higher co-occurrence appear graphically close, while graphically distant clusters are treated as separate issues in the literature. Moreover, words used most frequently within a cluster appear more prominent in the graph.

Distance and interconnections between thematic clusters related to food security (2000–2020)

As already observed in the descending hierarchy of the cluster (Fig. 3), the six clusters can be grouped into three macro-clusters. The cluster “diet quality programs” stands alone, with little integration with the other clusters. The “agriculture” and “biotechnology” clusters form a macro-cluster dealing with food production. The articles about this macro-cluster focus on improving agricultural production, increasing its resistance to the changing climate, and guaranteeing food security in a world with a fast-growing population. The third macro-cluster includes the methodological aspects and combines the thematic dimension with the impact of global warming. The articles in the macro-cluster, then, focus on the policies that have been implemented to face the challenges proposed by climate change, mainly concerning land management and strategies to prevent and adapt to climate change. The second and third macro-clusters show similarities, but while the second one adopts a techno-biological perspective on the issue, the third employs a socioeconomic perspective.

Hence, the thematic dimensions that can be identified in the food security literature comprise (a) domestic programs to tackle food insecurity; (b) policies to fight the challenges posed to global food security by climate change; and (c) analysis and technological improvements in food production to guarantee global food security.

6 Domestic programs for diet quality: an in-depth analysis

It is interesting to observe Cluster 6 in greater depth, as it represents a consistent part of the literature and a stand-alone cluster. To better understand its content, we applied Reinert’s ( 1983 ) analysis method to its sub-corpus of text segments. The analysis showed a division into five clusters, two dedicated to methodologies and three dedicated to an analytical dimension.

The methodological clusters show a clear division between qualitative methods, which focus on nutrition security (i.e., dietary diversity) at the individual level, and quantitative ones, which deal with food security (i.e., access to food and poverty) at a more macro level. The qualitative methods, which represent the majority, present a solid link to interviews and participatory approaches and a temporal dimension (name of months), highlighting that attention is given to developing countries and the impact of seasonal cycles on agricultural production. Conversely, the quantitative methods investigate the statistical correlation among different phenomena (e.g., food security and obesity) at the macro, and national level.

The analytical clusters unfold into two different streams in the literature: one develops methodological strategies and techniques, and the other devises in-depth substantive analyses of the issue of food security. The first stream of articles analyses how to measure food security and which instruments to assess its causes and effects ought to be used, including the comparative approach. The second stream adopts a policy approach that aims to answer how to intervene by considering food insecurity programs organizational and institutional contexts. Intervention strategies are defined by analyzing of food security’s risk factors, which can be semantically attributed to a health dimension (i.e., obesity, diseases, and mental health), and a behavioral and social dimension (i.e., purchasing habits, income, and education). These two dimensions are discussed together within the literature, showing how they are intrinsically connected in determining food security.

The relevance of the methodological dimension and the attention to risk factors confirm the importance of developing appropriate tools to measure food security, both in terms of causes and effects, to design more appropriate food security programs.

7 New thematic dimensions in the aftermath of COVID-19

The global COVID-19 pandemic has had a consistent impact, from a socioeconomic standpoint and on academic production. Consequently, the COVID-19 impacts (direct and indirect) on the global and local scale increased scholars’ engagement and attention. Hence, it is interesting to analyze the 2021 literature on food security to observe whether the crisis has impacted academic production on the issue and new thematic dimensions have emerged.

Thus, we can answer our third research question:

RQ 3: What new dimensions of the issue do the literature highlight concerning the COVID-19 pandemic?

The articles published in 2021 provide us insights into the COVID-19 impact on the issue of food security and whether the pandemic caused a change in focus in the literature.

In the first six months of 2021, 2,533 food security articles were published in 977 journals. The 2021 data also confirm the saliency of the topic and its multidisciplinary. However, while ABS remains the central area of focus (21.9%), we observed increased attention paid to ES (19%) and a decrease in focus on SS (13.8%). This result is in line with the growing trend in the cluster that deals with biotechnological aspects of food security and emerged by the journals publishing the highest number of articles on food security in 2021. Four out of five of the most active journals deal with ES ( Sustainability , International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health , Science of the Total Environment , and Journal of Cleaner Production ). However, it is more likely that these trends are linked to the increased scholarly and public attention paid to climate change. In addition, China has confirmed its importance as a publisher of food security literature.

COVID-19 appears as the fourth most frequent keyword proposed by the authors, after food security, food insecurity, and climate change. This result shows how COVID-19 has become the focus of many articles. Still, climate change remains a more substantial concern for academics dealing with food security, as highlighted by the subject areas and journals.

Reinert’s ( 1983 ) analysis method can better enlighten the impact of COVID-19 on the literature, showing how the topic is treated in articles and how the clusters have changed in the aftermath of the pandemic. Although the disappearance of the methodological cluster, the thematic clusters of 2021 present many similarities with those of the period 2000 – 2020. However, we observe significant differences in topics within the “policy” and “climate impact” clusters. While the 2000 – 2020 “policy” cluster focused on support policies for agricultural adaptation to climate change, the 2021 “policy” cluster has a stronger focus on sustainability policies, with governments seeming to have more importance and the social and environmental dimension being more directly debated. In addition, the 2000 – 2020 “climate impact” cluster became broader in 2021, including different global challenges.

On the one hand, we saw attention paid to the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other, we saw a switch in attention from agriculture to fishery, as an essential source of food for the global population that is currently under threat due to climate change and unsustainable fishing practices. In addition, a warming planet has disrupted and depleted fisheries worldwide, drawing scientific attention to overfishing as a factor increasing the vulnerability of fisheries.

In terms of relations among the different thematic clusters, we can observe that the “bio-technology” cluster has become more separate from the “agriculture” cluster, while the latter has become more closely linked to the “policy” and “climate impact” clusters. The closer link between food production and the global political dimension may be due to the increased public and political attention paid to the issue of climate change, as well as the growing impact of extreme climate events on food production.

Moreover, we observed that the “domestic programs for diet quality” cluster remains an isolated theme in the literature, confirming the silo approach to food insecurity on a domestic scale and the global issue of food production for a growing population and in a warming planet.

8 Discussion and conclusions

The systematic literature analysis addressed by the current article increases our knowledge of the vast and multidisciplinary food security scientific production and its theoretical and research dimensions and trends during the last twenty years. Furthermore, it traces the main lines of scientific interest in the topic and indicates the most transversal issues, weaknesses, and opportunities for future development.

In the period considered, food security becomes increasingly relevant in conjunction with and due to the impact of the economic and financial crises and climate change on the weakest segments of the population, both in developing and rich countries.

The main literature trends highlighted by our research can be summarized as follows:

The number of articles published has increased enormously in the last two decades, with peaks in 2006, 2013, and 2020, all linked to the outbreak of financial and social crises and their effects on agricultural commodities prices and food system dynamics. The place of the issue of food security within the literature has grown in importance over time. This is because it has become sensitive to the increasingly frequent global economic and health crises (Dodds et al. 2020 ; Galanakis 2020 ; O’Hara and Toussaint 2021 ) and the local environmental impact of climate change (Bohle et al. 1994 ; Lang et al. 2009 ).

Domestic programs for diet quality are the most explored dimension of food security and stand as a separate branch of the literature, considerably ahead of the most discussed macro-dimension of food production, which addresses policies, climate impact, and agriculture.

Despite a relatively stable trend in the evolution of the main topics detected, we can observe how the “biotechnology” cluster has started to receive increased attention in the past five years.

The general scientific attention to the “diet quality” issue was highly concentrated in 2006–2007, along with a growing strand of literature focused on the technological and biological aspect of food production for food security.

The household food security measurement and indicators are the most important scientific topics and, at the same time, separate from other arguments addressed by scholars. This separation indicates the difficulty of theoretically and empirically linking the micro nutritional aspects of food security to meso and macro elements, such as government agricultural policy and climatic impact on local diet change. Thus, even though food security is widely recognized as a multidimensional and cross-sectoral issue, academic analyses still seem affected by silo approaches in one of the most important fields of scientific analysis and public intervention.

The analysis of the articles published in 2021 confirms that ABS remains the central area of focus; increased scholarly and public attention to climate change impact on agriculture production and fishing has emerged in 2021.

Our analysis suggests some conclusive reflections concerning the need to link more solidly micro studies on food safety and nutrition poverty to macro changes such as climate change impact on agricultural production. However, the potential inherent in the extensive and multidisciplinary research on food safety has limitations, particularly the difficulty of connecting theoretically and empirically the global and regional dimensions of change (crisis) with the meso (policy) and micro (individual behavior) dimensions. Nevertheless, this greater connection can only benefit the action of governments and policies that have long been committed to this front.

The words that belong to the cluster are written in italics.

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Righettini, M.S., Bordin, E. Exploring food security as a multidimensional topic: twenty years of scientific publications and recent developments. Qual Quant 57 , 2739–2758 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-022-01452-3

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Digital Report by Jaehyun Han, Brian Hart, and Heather Williams, Kelsey Hartigan, Lachlan MacKenzie, Reja Younis, Otto Svendsen, Sissy Martinez, Zane Swanson, Anita Kirschenbaum, David Michel, Henry Ziemer, Michaela Simoneau — March 19, 2024

The Unjust Climate: Bridging the Gap for Women in Agriculture

Transcript — March 8, 2024

Food as the “Silent Weapon”: Russia’s Gains and Ukraine’s Losses

Report by Caitlin Welsh and Joseph Glauber — February 29, 2024

Latest Podcasts

Russia’s Food War

Podcast Episode by H. Andrew Schwartz and Caitlin Welsh — March 7, 2024

“Food as the “Silent Weapon”: Russia’s Gains and Ukraine’s Losses”: Audio Brief with Caitlin Welsh

Podcast Episode by Caitlin Welsh — February 29, 2024

Rafat Al-Akhali: Yemen on the Brink

Podcast Episode by Jon B. Alterman, Will Todman, and Leah Hickert — January 9, 2024

“From the Ground Up: Demining Farmland and Improving Access to Fertilizer to Restore Ukraine’s Agricultural Production”: Audio Brief with Caitlin Welsh

Podcast Episode by Caitlin Welsh — December 12, 2023

Past Events

USAID/MujerProspera: Advancing Gender Equality in Northern Central America

Reviewing COP28 Outcomes for Food Security

The Future of Public-Private Partnerships in Food Systems: Policies and Practices

From the Ground Up: Demining Farmland and Improving Access to Fertilizer to Restore Ukraine’s Agricultural Production Report Launch

China's Food Security Challenges

The United States' Role in Combatting Global Food Insecurity: Key Findings from the 2023 SOFI Report

2023’s Summer of Climate Shocks

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Please join the Americas Program for a conversation on innovations made to advance women's economic security in Northern Central America, featuring a Keynote Address by Administrator Samantha Power, United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Event — March 19, 2024

CSIS experts offer insights on some of the most important issue areas shaping the world in 2024.

Join the CSIS Global Food and Water Security Program for a discussion on gender equality in rural agriculture during the ongoing climate crisis. The discussion will feature representatives from FAO, USAID, U.S. Department of State, and USDA.

Event — March 8, 2024

The CSIS Global Food and Water Security Program hosted a discussion on gender equality in rural agriculture during the ongoing climate crisis featuring representatives from FAO, USAID, U.S. Department of State, and USDA.

For the past two years, CSIS’ Global Food and Water Security Program directed by Caitlin Welsh has analyzed the impacts of Russia’s war in Ukraine on global food security and on Ukraine’s agriculture sector and has shed light onto the ways that agriculture and food are central to Russia’s military strategy in Ukraine and its political strategy for expanding influence around the world. Caitilin joins the podcast to discuss these issues.

A short, spoken-word summary from CSIS’s Caitlin Welsh on her report with Joseph Glauber, Food as the “Silent Weapon”: Russia’s Gains and Ukraine’s Losses.

As Russia’s war on Ukraine enters its third year, CSIS experts analyze new data on the growth of Russia’s global agricultural market shares—and the extent to which it has forcefully diminished Ukraine’s.

Russia, Ukraine, and Global Food Security: A Two-Year Assessment

Receding global food prices mask an ongoing food security crisis still affected by Russia’s war on Ukraine. CSIS’s Caitlin Welsh examines the role of food and agriculture in Russia’s war strategy, including how Russia capitalizes from the food insecurity it causes. 

Critical Questions by Caitlin Welsh — February 27, 2024

The Trade and Food Security Debate

With the WTO’s 13th Ministerial Conference beginning next week, there is renewed global focus on trade challenges to food security. Katrin Kuhlmann explores the state of debate on trade and food security and what more can be done to advance positive outcomes from MC13. 

Critical Questions by Katrin Kuhlmann — February 22, 2024

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UN System Chief Executive Board for Coordination (UNSCEB)

In April 2008 the UN System Chief Executives Board for Coordination (UNSCEB) established the Food Security Initiative which builds on the work of the Secretary-General’s High-Level Task Force on Global Food and Nutrition Security. 

• High-level Task Force on Global Food Security Crisis Working to ensure that the UN system, international financial institutions and the WTO are ready to provide robust and consistent support to countries struggling to cope with food insecurity.
• UN System Standing Committee on Nutrition Established by ECOSOC in 1977 as the Sub-Committee on Nutrition within the Administrative Committee on Coordination of the United Nations (ACC) and was renamed the UN System Standing Committee on Nutrition on 2001. Committee reports are linked below under ECOSOC.
• COVID-19: Food security policy briefs Include reports and policy briefs on the UN System response to COVID-19 and its effects on food security.

Main UN Organs Addressing Food Securiy and Nutrition

General Assembly

The General Assembly considers  Agriculture development, food security and nutrition as an item on   its agenda which is assigned to the 2nd Committee. The following are the documents issued on the agenda over the years:

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• Reports of the 2nd Committee

Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)

The Economic and Social Council considers various reports of committees, funds and programmes that deal with the issue of food security and agriculture during its sessions. 

• Reports of the Executive Board of the World Food Programme
• Annual performance of the World Food Programme reports
• Reports of the UN System Standing Committee on Nutrition
• Report of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations on recent developments in agricultural and rural statistics

Funds, Programmes and Specialized Agencies Addressing Food Issues

• Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) was established as a specialized agency of the United Nations in 1945. One of FAO's strategic objectives is to help eliminate hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition.
• World Food Programme (WFP) Founded in 1963, WFP is the lead UN agency that responds to food emergencies and has programmes to combat hunger worldwide. Reports of the WFP of its Executive Board and on its annual performance are linked above under ECOSOC.
• International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) Founded in 1977, IFAD focuses on rural poverty reduction, working with poor rural populations in developing countries to eliminate poverty, hunger, and malnutrition.
• World Bank Founded in 1944, the World Bank is actively involved in funding food projects and programmes.
• United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was established in 1972 as the international arm providing guidance and governance to environmental issues. One of the topics that UNEP addresses currently is food security.

Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food

The Special Rapporteur is an independent expert appointed by the Human Rights Council to examine and report back on a country situation or a specific human rights theme. This is an honorary position and the expert is not a staff of the United Nations nor paid for his/her work. 

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Committee on World Food Security (CFS)

The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) is an international and intergovernmental platform that works to ensure food security and access to nutrition. The Committee reports to the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and to the FAO Conference.

In 2009 the High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) on food security and nutrition was established as part of the reform of the international governance of food security to advise the Committee on World Food Security. The HLPE aims to improve the robustness of policy making by providing independent, evidence-based analysis and advice at the request of the CFS.

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Food Security

USDA supports global food security through in-country capacity building, basic and applied research, and support for improved market information, statistics and analysis. With 870 million people around the world who do not have access to a sufficient supply of nutritious and safe food, establishing global food security is important not only to hundreds of millions of hungry people, but also to the sustainable economic growth of these nations and the long-term economic prosperity of the United States.

As we help countries become more food secure and raise incomes, we also expand markets for American producers. U.S. agricultural exports to developing countries in Southeast Asia, Central America, and Sub-Saharan Africa have grown at more than twice the annual rate as compared to developed countries. U.S. poultry meat exports to Sub-Saharan Africa expanded 180 percent from 2009 to 2011.

Given population growth and rising incomes, it is estimated that the demand for food will rise by 70 to 100 percent by 2050. To meet this need, the United Nations estimates that production in developing countries will need to almost double.

Building Local Capacity, Increasing Productivity, and Improving Markets and Trade

USDA is strategically placed in over 80 countries constantly monitoring agricultural matters globally. Since 2010, USDA has aligned appropriate programs to Feed the Future plans to support agriculture development in target countries and regions: Ghana, Kenya, East Africa, Bangladesh, Haiti, Guatemala and Central America. plans to support agriculture development in target countries and regions: Ghana, Kenya, East Africa, Bangladesh, Haiti, Guatemala and Central America. Our international food aid programs benefited about 34 million individuals globally with assistance valued at nearly $1.6 billion.

The McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program supported the education, child development, and food security of more than 16 million of the world's poorest children. The program provides U.S. agricultural products, as well as financial and technical assistance, for school feeding and maternal and child nutrition projects.

The Borlaug Fellowship Program brought 272 scientists to the U.S. and focuses on research topics such as food safety, soil fertility, post harvest technology, biotechnology, animal health, and rural development.

The Cochran Fellowship Program trained 1,732 individuals worldwide in topics such as regulatory and certification systems, agricultural production, biotechnology, and plant and animal disease control.

In 2011, the annual Food Security Assessment was expanded to include 77 countries; completed assessments of agricultural statistics and market information in 10 Feed the Future countries and identified key areas where improvement is needed; and conducted in-depth assessments of the capacity of the statistical systems of Ghana, Haiti, Tanzania, and Bangladesh.

We have undertaken significant efforts to build local in-country capacity to confront food security, including:

• Training small farmers and foreign officials on plant and animal health systems, risk analysis, and avoiding post harvest loss;
• Completing assessments on climate change;
• Increasing agricultural productivity.

In the targeted Feed the Future countries and regions, nearly 60,000 individuals have received USDA agricultural productivity or food security training, 7 critical policy reforms have been adopted with USDA assistance, and $20 million in microloans have been disbursed.

Feed the Future - A Government-Wide Effort to Combat Global Hunger

In 2009, G8 nations committed to "act with the scale and urgency needed to achieve sustainable global food security" and to be accountable and coordinate with country development plans. In the subsequent three years, the United States invested over $3.7 billion to address global food security, exceeding the President's commitment, and launched his Feed the Future Initiative.

In 2010, the U.S. helped launch the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, an international, multilateral trust fund that has already awarded $658 million to finance country development plans in 18 low-income countries, with 8.2 million beneficiaries.

Driving Innovative Research and Technologies

Under Feed the Future, research investments specifically designed for global food security have more than doubled, from $50 million in 2008 to $120 million in 2011. The Feed the Future Research Strategy, developed by USAID and USDA, focuses on the four agro-climatic zones where global poverty and hunger are concentrated, and targets two-to-four major problems in each zone to maximize impact on poor families.

In 2010, the USDA and USAID Norman Borlaug Commemorative Research Initiative launched a new era of partnership on research. Under this initiative, USDA is conducting research on wheat rust, a major threat to wheat production worldwide, and on aflatoxin, a toxic fungus that infects groundnuts and other crops, and causes illness in humans. Other research includes developing a vaccine for East Coast fever, a major killer of cattle in East Africa, and supporting research to enhance animal, grain and legumes production. In Guatemala, Haiti, Bangladesh, Kenya, and Ghana, USDA has a number of new technologies under research, 12 of which are being field tested and 4 have been introduced locally.

USDA researchers sequenced the genome of the wheat, as well as the wheat stem rust pathogen which threatens to destroy wheat crops worldwide and distributed new wheat germplasm globally to ensure productive harvests. USDA researchers have also released 1,575 genetic variations in beans.

Learn more about agriculture and food security efforts underway at the U.S. Agency for International Development .

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Food Insecurity

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About this Research Topic

In 2015, at least 795 million people worldwide, some 12.9% of world population, lacked enough food to lead a healthy and active life. The majority lived in developing countries in Asia (512 million) and Sub-Saharan Africa (220 million) and these figures are only increasing. Food insecurity (FI) has ...

Keywords : Food systems, nutrition, hunger, right to food, food insecurity

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Enhancing Food Security and Income for Smallholder Farmers in Angola

Photo credit: Wilson Piassa, World Bank

“ The irrigation canal that our community has through the project allows us to continue to work the land and harvest crops satisfactorily all year round even when it doesn't rain . Another gain for me, and many other women, is that now, before we plant, we know how to calculate the cost and benefit of what we grow. We also know which products are appropriate for each plot of land. The farmer field schools have been of great value to us.”

Maria Mateus, Chissapa Farmers’ Association, Camacupa municipality, Bie province.

Angola’s agricultural sector was devastated by the Angolan civil war of 1975–2002, resulting in very low agricultural production and heavy reliance on food imports, sustained by oil revenue. But when oil prices dropped by over 72 percent between March 2014 and March 2016, a fiscal crisis ensued that threatened food security and prompted the government of Angola to accelerate domestic agricultural production. This required addressing key constraints, including its weak capacity for planning and advisory services, limited use of improved agricultural practices and technologies, limited access to modern inputs (including seeds and fertilizers), inadequate market information, and high post-harvest losses.

The Angola Smallholder Agriculture Development and Commercialization Project ’s development objective was to increase smallholder agriculture productivity, production, and marketing for selected crops in the project areas (the central and northern provinces of Bie, Huambo, and Malanje). These provinces, once at the epicenter of the civil war, had great agricultural potential. World Bank involvement brought global experience and knowledge on pro-poor agriculture programs for smallholders. The project launched in 2016 and set up 4,000 Farmer Field Schools (FFSs) to strengthen smallholder farmers’ technical, organizational, and managerial capacities. The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MINAGRIF) relied on technical assistance from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to implement capacity-building activities that benefited over 150,000 smallholder farmers. These skills development programs were complemented by facilitating farmers’ access to agricultural inputs and markets through a value chain development approach.

Between 2016 and 2022, the project implemented 4,000 FFS, benefiting 179,000 people (of whom 49 percent were women), helping them to increase agricultural productivity, agricultural production, and the proportion of produce sold. The main crops supported by the project were maize, cassava, beans, potatoes, tomatoes, and cabbage. The FFSs were very effective at increasing the ability of small farmers to adopt the new agricultural practices promoted by the project and increasing productivity. In turn, this allowed project beneficiaries to improve their incomes and promoted food security.

• The average crop yield of targeted crops increased by 65 percent to 196 percent compared to the baseline. Compared to project non-beneficiaries, project beneficiaries had higher yields.  The yield differentials ranging from 5 percent to 86 percent. The highest yield differential was maize with 86 percent, 67 percent for beans, 63 percent for potatoes, 28% for cassava, and 5% for tomatoes.
• Aggregate crop production increased by 64 percent over the baseline and exceeded project targets by 16 percent.
• The proportion of production sold by smallholder farmers was estimated to have increased from a baseline of 17 percent to 69 percent at project closing.
• Due to substantial increases in productivity, production, and the proportion of production sold, project beneficiaries had created, in total, 240 savings and credit groups by October 2021, with estimated savings amounting to the equivalent of $500, 000.
• As a result of the project’s interventions, the Angolan Government reported increased social expenditure among project beneficiaries (including spending on better housing, children’s education, and transport), as well as the purchase and use of modern agricultural inputs.

Bank Group Contribution

The total project cost was $95 million, of which $20 million equivalent was an in-kind and cash contribution by the government of Angola and $5 million equivalent was in-kind by project beneficiaries mainly coming under matching grants and their improved income from increased sales. A $70 million IBRD loan constituted the remainder of the total project cost.

FAO was the main partner and provided technical assistance to establish 4,000 FFSs out of the 5,000 planned for the project. The project collaborated with renowned international centers of excellence, namely the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, International Potato Center, and International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center to acquire improved planting material for local testing (for adaptability), thus expediting innovation.

Looking Ahead

FFS Manuals have been prepared and training provided to Angola’s Agrarian Development Institute at MINAGRIF to help entrench the project’s approach in the country’s agricultural extension delivery systems. The Smallholder Agricultural Transformation Project (MOSAP 3), for $300 million in IBRD financing, was approved by the World Bank in June 2022, and will support Angola in building on the successes of MOSAP2.

Smallholder Agriculture Development and Commercialization Project

Farmers’ Field Schools Pave the way to Better Agricultural Prospects in Angola

The World Bank in Angola

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Food safety and security: what were favourite topics for research in the last decade?

The world is faced with the challenge to feed an estimated 9 billion population of the Earth by 2050. To address the scientific evidence for the safety of food, I searched the Web of Science bibliographical and citation database for most cited articles from this research area. The topics with greatest impact on the research community, judged by their annual rate of citations during the last decade, were food-borne pathogens and toxins, with emerging genetic studies and new methods of visualising toxins on surfaces. Epidemiological and survey studies demonstrated that there was systematic effort to document, rapidly detect and control epidemic spread of disease and that these measures decreased the threat to food safety in developed countries, but that there is still much room for improvement. Research relevant for developing countries included the potential molecular targets to alleviate accumulation of arsenic in rice. As in other areas of research and life, human factor seems to be the most important one for the safety of food. The five keys to safer food of the WHO – keep clean, separate raw and cooked, cook thoroughly, keep food at safe temperatures, use safe water and raw materials – are thus still very relevant for the developed as much as the developing world.

The safety of food is an important health, social and economical issue. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), foodborne and waterborne diarrhoeal diseases kill an estimated 2.2 million people annually, 1.9 million of them children (1). Unsafe food can be the cause of or contribute to many diseases, from diarrhoea to some cancers, so that food safety, nutrition and food security are among WHO’s 13 strategic objectives (1). Food safety also has potential impact on at least 4 of the 8 millennium development goals set by the United Nations for 2015 (2): eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, reduction of child mortality, improvement of maternal health, and ensuring of environmental stability. To ensure safer food for health, WHO also developed training materials called ‘Five Keys to Safer Food’, promoting simple health measures based on evidence from scientific research for use of food handlers, including customers, in order to decrease the burden of foodborne diseases (3).

Food and its safety has become the topic of globally increasing research efforts, particularly in view of the growth of human population. The interest of the scientific community in food safety is illustrated by the recent special issue of the Science magazine, which explored the potential of science to tackle the challenge of feeding the estimated 9 billion people who will inhabit the Earth by 2050 (4). The topic stirred a heated debate on the printed and electronic pages of the journal (5). The 2011 crisis at a nuclear power plant after the earthquake in Japan and the detection of radioactivity in certain food samples contributed to the concerns about the safety of food from that area (6). Most recent outbreak of a deadly haemolytic-uremic syndrome in Germany, caused by bacterial contamination of vegetable sprouts (7), also drew the attention to food safety. In view of the attention of the scientific community to the topic of food, I was interested in the scientific evidence for its safety. To assess research published on this topic in the last decade, I searched the Web of Science, bibliographical database that also uses citations to published research as a measure of impact on research community (8).

I performed the search of the Web of Science (WoS), the citation database of the Thomson Reuters, formerly the Institute for Science Information (ISI) (8). WoS was chosen as a widely used citation database (9-12), so that the results of the study could be comparable to other citation analyses. The search was performed on 18 March 2011 and included all databases available in WoS ( Science Citation Index Expanded , Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index ). The search term was ‘food safety’, as this term is used by the WHO (3) and the time span was limited to the last 10 years (2001–2010). The search was then refined by selecting ‘article’ as the document type. The articles with highest citations rates, defined as the number of citations per year after publication (11), were analyzed. WoS tools were used to present the number of articles and their citations, relevant research areas, leading journals, countries, institutions and funding sources.

To get an insight into the possibly most influential articles in the area of food safety, I identified top 10 articles according to their citation intensity, defined as the average number of citations received per year after the publication date. Because of the different times of publication, the total number of citations at a certain time point may not be the best measure of the article’s visibility and influence, so the citation intensity was taken as the proxy for the interest of the research community for the research, regardless of the time of its publication (11). Only the most recent studies, particularly those published in 2010 would have disadvantaged by such approach (11).

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The search retrieved 11 565 out of 14 417 309 indexed items for the 2001–2010 time span. Out of those, 69.6% were designated as ‘articles’ (n=8044) and the rest were ‘reviews’ (13.1% items) ‘proceedings papers’ (10.5%), or other types of bibliographical items ( Table 1 ). Items classified as ‘articles’ by WoS should bring results of original research (11), so that further analysis was performed only for this bibliographical item. As the database retrieved articles and/or citations to some items from 2000 and 2011, citation data for individual articles were manually checked and only the relevant post-publications years up to the end of 2010 were included in the analysis. Descriptive data on the total publications ( Table 1 and Figure 1 ) were presented for all retrieved items because it was not possible to separate citations for outlying years.

Types of items, areas of research and top 10 countries, funding agencies, institution and journals publishing research on food safety in 2001-2010*

*Data from Web of Science (WoS), search performed 18 March 2011. Categorisation of items is according to WoS.

†Percentages were calculated from total number of published items in 2001-2010 (n=11 565) for the type of bibliographical item or the total number of articles (n=8044) for all other items. Percentages for areas of research were not calculated as articles may be assigned to more than 1 area of research.

Number of publications about food safety (blue line), classified as ‘articles’ by the Web of Science , and citations to these publications (green line) in 2001–2010.

Time trends in food safety research publications

The number of articles continually increased over time, from 385 in 2001 to 1316 in 2009 and 1307 in 2010 ( Figure 1 ). These articles received increasing numbers of citation over the years, from 128 in 2000 to 16 018 in 2010 ( Figure 1 ). The number of citations increased more rapidly than the number of published articles, demonstrating the growing interest for and the impact of food safety research. The causes for the increasing trend are not clear, and may include a number of factors, from the increasing number of relevant journals covered by the database; growing number of researchers in this area; increased interest of funders, both public and commercial; increased collaboration in the field, particularly in globally relevant topics, or improved quality of research which generates more and better (and more publishable) data. While it is difficult to assess factors related to the research community, the journal coverage of the Thompson Reuters’ databases increased 22% from 2002 to 2010 (12) and surely contributed to the general increase in publications and their citations.

Most of the published articles were classified into the category of ‘Food science & technology’, followed by a range of related categories, from ‘Biotechnology and applied microbiology’ to ‘Chemistry, applied’ in the top 10 categories ( Table 1 ). Top 10 countries that published most articles in food safety were responsible for 82.6% of all retrieved articles ( Table 1 ). Among them the leader was the USA, followed by England, Germany and Canada. The only developing country that made a significant contribution to this area was China, which may reflect the rising concerns in China over food safety, particularly after the 2008 scandal of milk formulas tainted with melamine (13).Agencies for funding research on food safety were few ( Table 1 ). As most of the published articles did not carry statements on funding, it is difficult to make an objective conclusion on the extent of financial support for food safety research and the interpretation is possible only for those articles that carried funding declaration. The top 10 funding agencies provided support for only 199 of the 8044 articles (2.5%) ( Table 1 ). Among them, the European Commission or the European Union funded most articles (62 articles), followed by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (34 articles).

The top 10 institutions with most published articles were responsible for 9.1% of all publications ( Table 1 ). Among them, 6 were US-based, and non-US based institutions were located in The Netherlands, China, Canada and France ( Table 1 ).

There was no dominating journal among the 10 journals with the highest volume of articles on food safety, which published 18.5% of all retrieved articles ( Table 1 ). The lead was taken by the Journal of Food Protection , which published 336 articles or 4.2% of all retrieved articles. Finally, the dominating language of the publications was English (93.0% of all retrieved articles), followed by German and French (3.6%). All other languages were used by only 3.4% of the retrieved articles.

Most cited publications on food safety

Among the top 10 articles with highest citation intensity there were 3 review articles (14-16) and 6 original research articles (17-23) ( Table 2 ).

Top 10 articles published in 2000-2009 with highest number of citations intensity, presented as the average number of citations per each year after publication*

*Citations were calculated for the years after publication, including the year of publication, up to the end of 2010. The exception was the article by Koopmans and Duizer, which had 1 citation in 2003 although the official paper publication was in 2004.

The review article with the highest citation rate (34 citations per year) was published in the British Medical Bulletin in 2003 and addressed the hazards of heavy metal contamination, predominantly lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic (14). Cadmium exposure comes mainly from re-chargeable nickel-cadmium batteries, which are often thrown away with the regular garbage, as well as from cigarette smoke. Exposure to mercury occurs via food, mainly fish, while there is no evidence so far that amalgam dental fillings contribute to mercury exposure and poisoning. Lead exposure currently comes primarily from emissions of petrol combustion in vehicles, while the lead-based paints and food containers have been abandoned. Finally, food is the most important source of arsenic poisoning for most populations, although drinking water could be a source of long-term exposure to arsenic.

Two other review articles received an average of 16 citations per post-publication year. The paper published in the International Journal of Food Microbiology in 2004 covered state of the art research on foodborne viruses (15). Norovirus and hepatitis A virus are highly infectious and lead to wide spread outbreaks of disease because they can persist in food manually handled by an infected food-handler and if such food is not heated or treated in other way after handling. Thus, greatest attention in preventive efforts should be given to good manufacturing practice to avoid introduction of viruses during food handling. The article on the control of Listeria monocytogenes (16) in the food-processing environment was published in the Journal of Food Protection in 2002, addressing the problem of large outbreaks of scattered cases after a virulent strain got established in the food-processing chain and thus infected multiple food lots over a short period of production. To increase the safety of ready-to-eat foods, there is a need to establish a sampling programme in the production environment, organization and interpretation of collected data and appropriate response to the positive finding of Listeria contamination.

The article with the highest citation rate (annual average of 44 citations) among all 8044 retrieved articles was published in Nature in 2005 (17), describing the genome sequencing and analysis of Aspergillus oryzae , a fungus used in the production of traditional fermented foods and drinks in Japan. The article shows that the genome of this Aspergillus species acquired specific expansion of genes for secretory hydrolytic enzymes, amino-acid metabolism and amino-acid/sugar uptake transporters, making it a suitable organism for fermentation.

The article ranked as the 3rd among the 10 top publications came from a collaborative group of researchers in Japan and UK and explored the transporters of arsenite in rice plants (18). The article was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA in 2008 and received an average of 16 citations each year since then. The authors demonstrated that the possible accumulation of carcinogenic arsenite in rice grains, which caused massive poisoning in some Asian countries, was due to two different types of transporters in the rice roots, which are also used for silicone transport. High expression of genes for these two transporters in rice leads to silicone accumulation, which increases yield production, but also increases arsenic accumulation in the grains. The authors suggest that increasing silicone availability in the soil may suppress arsenic accumulation in rice and thus alleviate potential risk of arsenic poisoning.

The next most cited article, published in Nature in 2010 (19) and receiving 21 citations in the same year, described the new methodology for the non-destructive and ultra-sensitive visualisation of single molecules on surfaces. The formation a monolayer of gold nanoparticles as a ‘smart dust’ over surfaces allowed the demonstration of pesticide residues on citrus fruits.

High citation rate was achieved by the article presenting a case study of using a specific kinetic model to describe thermal inactivation of microbial vegetative cells in the food (20). The article was published in the International Journal of Food Microbiology in 2002. Based on published studies on thermal inactivation of microbial agents, the author made a theoretical exploration with a new mathematical model to calculate the necessary time and temperature treatment to pasteurize or sterilize foods.

Research articles describing outbreaks of common food poisoning also reached the top list of citation-intense publications. An epidemiological study of trends in indigenous foodborne diseases and deaths in England and Wales in 1992 to 2000 was published in the Gut in 2002 (21), and attracted an annual average of 15.6 citations. The authors analyzed routinely available surveillance data, special survey data and hospital episode statistics to estimate the burden and trends of indigenous foodborne disease. Between 1992 and 2000, the burden of indigenous foodborne disease fell by 53%.The most important pathogens were campylobacter, salmonella, Clostridium perfringens , verocytotoxin-producing Escherichia coli O157 and Listeria monocytogenes . In 2000, campylobacter still remained the highest threat, and the control of other pathogens was required to lower the mortality rates. A description of prevalence of Campylobacter species , Escherichia coli and Salmonella serovars in retail meat products from Greater Washington DC area in the USA was published in the Applied and Environmental Microbiology in 2001 (22) and received an average of 13 citations annually since its publications. The authors analysed 825 samples of retail raw chicken, turkey, pork and beef meat from supermarkets, and found that retail raw meats were often contaminated with foodborne pathogens. Chicken meat was more contaminated with Campylobacter that any other meat (70% of samples in comparison to 14% in turkey and 1.7% in pork and 0.5% in beef). The authors called for the introduction of stricter measures for ensuring food safety, particular the implementation of hazard analysis of critical control points (HACCP), as well as increased consumer education efforts to ensure food safety at home.

Finally, an article on the toxicity of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE) in foodstuffs also reached high citation rate and was ranked the 9th on the top 10 list, with 15 citations per year since its publication in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry in 2003 (23). PBDE is used as a flame retardant and seems to be present in a number of food samples, mostly in meat products and eggs, with an estimated dietary intake for an adult male of 97 ng/d in an area in Spain.

Taking into consideration all limitations of a scientometric analysis of research topics (9-12), the most useful topics in food safety during the last decade, according to their impact in research community, seemed to have been food-borne pathogens and toxins. We have also witnessed the emergence of genetic studies and new sophisticated methodologies for detecting small amounts of toxin residues on surfaces. Epidemiological and survey studies showed that there was a systematic effort to document, rapidly detect and control epidemic spread of disease. Some of these measures decreased the threat to food safety in developed countries, but there is still much room for improvement. Novel areas for improving the safety of food in the developing countries were also opened, such as the study on the potential molecular targets to alleviate accumulation of arsenic in rice. The five keys to safer food of the WHO (3) will remain most relevant for the developed as much as the developing world. As in other areas of research and life, the human factor is the most important one for the safety of food, and cannot be fully replaced by a novel chemical, agricultural or processing technology or gene transfer.

Acknowledgments

Funding: The study was supported in part by the research grant No. 206–1080314–0245 from the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports, Republic of Croatia. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Ethical approval: Not required.

Authorship declaration: AM conceived and conducted the study, and wrote the manuscript.

Competing interests: The author has completed the Unified Competing Interest form at www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf (available on request from the author) and declares: no support from any organization for the submitted work; no financial relationships with any organizations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous 3 years; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work.