Food Security for Equitable Futures

Project Dates

October 2020 - October 2024

Funder

UK Research and Innovation – UKRI FLF

Project Summary

This project, launched 21st October, 2020, will explore how lives in the Global South are shaped by undernourishment and hunger.

Food insecurity is a situation in which access to sufficient safe and nutritious food is sometimes or often problematic. Evidence from high-income countries has pointed to the adverse consequences of food insecurity on child and adolescent development, including impacts on health behaviours, distress, feelings of shame, poor educational outcomes, and unhealthy diets. Less well-investigated are the consequences of household food insecurity in the Global South, particularly with respect to child and adolescent development and long-term well-being.

This project will provide impactful, much-needed evidence on how timing and persistence of food insecurity matter over the lifecourse in the Global South and evidencing its impacts on under-researched population groups.

Employing a mixed-methods approach using both secondary data from the Young Lives survey and primary qualitative data, the project will focus on food insecurity in India, Ethiopia, Peru, and Vietnam and will address the following research questions:

1. (How) is food insecurity in childhood and adolescence associated with well-being over time?
2. Which population groups are vulnerable to food insecurity and its sequelae?
3. (How) can households effectively mitigate the negative effects of food insecurity?
4. To what extent does food insecurity impact some household members more than others?

Publications & Latest News

Book:

Clair, A., Fledderjohann, J., & Knowles, B. (2021). A Watershed Moment for Social Policy and Human Rights? Where next for the UK Post-COVID. Bristol University Press. ISBN: 978-1447363842

Peer-Reviewed Articles:

Fledderjohann, J., Patterson, S., & Owino, M. (2023). Food Insecurity: A Barrier to Reproductive Justice Globally. International Journal of Sexual Health, 35(2), 296-311. doi.org/10.1080/19317611.2023.2201841
Argaw, T.L., Fledderjohann, J., Aurino, E., & Vellakkal, S. (2023). Children’s Educational Outcomes and Persistence and Severity of Household Food Insecurity in India: Longitudinal Evidence from Young Lives. The Journal of Nutrition, 153(4), 1101-1110. DOI.org/10.1016/j.tjnut.2023.02.008
Fledderjohann, J., & Channon, M. (2022). Gender, nutritional disparities, and child survival in Nepal. BMC Nutrition, 8 (50), 1-15. DOI: 10.1186/s40795-022-00543-6

Other Publications:

Fledderjohann, J., Mishra, S., Rathi, A., Vasudev, C. (2023). “Written Evidence on FCDO’s approach to sexual and reproductive health”. UK Parliament Call for Evidence
Fledderjohann, J., Owino, M., & Patterson, S., (2023). “How food insecurity affects people’s rights to choose whether or not to have children, and how they parent”. The Conversation
Fledderjohann, J. & Channon, M. (2022). “8 billion people: why trying to control the population is often futile – and harmful”. The Conversation
Fledderjohann, J. & Patterson, S. (2022). “Why food insecurity matters for reproductive justice”. Thrive North Lancashire.
Kroeger, C., Reeves, A. & Fledderjohann, J. (2022). “Higher Temperatures are Associated with Short-term Increases in Food Insecurity – A Natural Experiment Across Indian States, 2014-2017″. SocArXiv. June 23. doi:10.31235/osf.io/wxt6g.
Fledderjohann, J., Clair, A., & Knowles, B. (2022, July 4).Feeding the Future? Evidence on Food Insecurity in the UK. Centre for Child & Family Justice Research Policy Brief Series, Lancaster, UK.
Healy et al. (2022). The NCRM wayfinder guide to equitable research relations in and after Covid-19. Wayfinder Guide for the National Centre for Research Methods.

Expert Interview Series

Mr V R Raman on Food Insecurity in India:

In the 5th episode of our “Expert Interview Series”, Dr Jasmine Fledderjohann, Principal Investigator on the Food Security for Equitable Futures project, speaks to Mr V R Raman, an expert on various social development systems and policies, especially in relation to the Indian subcontinent. He completed his post-graduate studies in Public Health at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa and his graduate studies in English language and literature at the University of Calicut, Kerala, India. Over the last three decades, Mr. Raman has worked closely with most of the state-led flagship social development missions in India, such as the National Literacy Mission, National Health Mission, Swachh Bharat (Sanitation) Mission, Jal Jeevan (Drinking Water) Mission and Poshan Abhiyan (Nutrition Mission). In addition, he is a co-founder and leader of some of the noted and mass-scale community health and nutrition programs and a few important state-civil society partnership organisations. Through his work, Mr Raman has explored gender, physical and social vulnerabilities and how they can be alleviated to build a human rights and dignity-based equitable society. He is currently the National Convenor of the Public Health Resource Network in India and is associated with several organisations and people’s campaigns.

In this interview, Mr. Raman identifies the various interconnected dimensions of food insecurity in India. Dr. Jasmine Fledderjohann and Mr Raman discuss the following issues that have a direct bearing on food insecurity in India:

• The links between water and sanitation with food insecurity and malnourishment,

• The structural challenges farmers are facing,

• The inadequacy and problems of market-based solutions in addressing the structural challenges of hunger and food insecurity,

• The challenges of inflation and price hikes and their impact on the lives of the masses,

• How much state-led schemes are able to address food insecurity,

• The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on food security,

• The need to move away from a market-centric economic model to a people-centric economy and,

• The need to refine data collection and monitoring practices to generate research geared toward identifying and alleviating food insecurity.

Here is the link for interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poIirI3UlEU

Mr Haldhar Mahto on Food Insecurity in India:

In this episode of our expert interview series, our postdoctoral fellow Dr. Ankita Rathi speaks with Mr. Haldar Mahto, an Indian public policy expert. Mr. Mahto is currently working with the Grievance Redressal System in Ranchi, Jharkhand, India. Prior to this, he worked as the member of the State Food Commission, Government of Jharkhand, and was actively associated with important campaigns such as the Right to Food Campaign and Jan Swastha Abhiyan (People’s Health Movement) in India. Mr. Mahto has actively engaged on issues specific to food insecurity, public health, and governance in India, particularly in Jharkhand (an east Indian state).

Mr. Mahto offers an on-the-ground understanding of key food insecurity and nutritional challenges amongst tribal communities in India. Landlessness, denial of rights and lack of entitlement, a shift to market-based agriculture, climate change induced disasters, and lack of decentralized governance are some of the primary factors he identifies as linked to food insecurity. He also explains the importance of existing social policies such as the Public Distribution System (PDS, a key government programme that provides food grains to people at affordable prices) and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA, a program that aims to provide livelihood to people in rural areas by guaranteeing 100 days of work in a year). As Mr. Mahto notes, these programs actively combat hunger among marginalized tribal and agrarian communities. Major challenges of the existing social policies in India he highlights include: Difficulties of service delivery to remote areas; excessive reliance on local private intermediaries in the PDS; inability of the local private intermediaries and Angadwadi workers (community health care workers who provide supplementary nutritional and educational care services as part of government health care programs) to provide services to the poor equitably; and eligibility problems associated with inclusion vs. exclusion of some families. The key to addressing regional food insecurity in India, Mr. Mahto explains, includes decentralized local governance and a shift to multi-crop farming.

Here is the link for interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYQuTIw_K7I

Book: 'A Watershed Moment for Social Policy and Human Rights? Where next for the UKPost-COVID', by Drs Amy Clair, Jasmine Fledderjohann, and Bran Knowles was launched on 20th July 2021. A recording of the launch, chaired by Prof Karen Broadhurst.

The book considers inequalities both before and during the pandemic in 4 key domains: medical care, food, housing, and access to digital technology. Importantly, it highlights how the social problems observed during the pandemic in fact stem from long-standing structural inequalities linked to erosion of social protection policies over the past several decades. The book identifies the pitfalls in relying on charities and big tech to resolve these social problems and explains why this is a pivotal moment for social policy--one which could, with active investment, result in a more equitable and just system going forward.

Here is the link for book launch event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRSSO-1XIfw