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This thesis examines the enduring problem of food insecurity in Africa, with a particular focus on Ethiopia and Kenya. It considers food insecurity both in acute terms - the occurrence of famine and chronic terms - famine vulnerability. More specifically it provides a new interpre~tion of the causes of food insecurity in East Africa, with respect to some of the causal factors and viable solutions. It does so by locating the occurrence of famine, and countries vulnerability to it, in the context of the global food system. The global food system is, as yet, an under-examined factor in contemporary famine analysis, particularly in East Africa and this thesis aims to explore it more comprehensively than hitherto. This thesis also makes a substantive contribution to understanding the concept of Food Sovereignty in an African context. Food Sovereignty deserves to be a more significant part of contemporary narratives that at present dominate the political and social dilemmas about food insecurity. However there are serious obstacles such as political relationships, land tenure and the industrial system of agriculture that hinder the development of Food Sovereignty as a viable option. Natural disasters, demographic pressures and ill conceived economic policies are an ongoing part of the story but in essence food insecurity is ultimately political. This thesis concludes that Food Sovereignty should be explored as a political . solution to a political problem.

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Addressing malnutrition (in all its forms) whilst developing a global food system compatible with environmental sustainability remains one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. The current framing of our food systems fails to fully capture the inequities in production, distribution, efficiency and sufficiency of all components necessary to end malnutrition. This research presents a holistic, scalable and replicable framework to model food system pathways (across all essential nutritional components, including macronutrients, micronutrients and amino acids), providing quantification of production, losses, allocation and conversions at all stages of the value chain. Furthermore, this framework attempts to translate current food metrics-often presented in tonnage or absolute terms-into daily per capita figures to provide important context for how this translates into food security and nutrition. This framework can be applied at global, regional and national levels. Here, this model is first presented at a global level and then focuses on India as a national-level example. Results highlight that, at a global level, we produce the equivalent of 5800 kilocalories and 170 grams of protein per person per day through crops alone. However, major system inefficiencies mean that less than half of crop calories and protein are delivered (or converted) for final food supply. Pathway inefficiencies are even more acute for micronutrients; more than 60% of all essential micronutrients assessed in this study are lost between production and consumer-available phases of the food supply system. Globally we find very large inequalities in per capita levels of food production, ranging from 19,000 kilocalories (729 grams of protein) per person per day in North America to 3300 kilocalories (80 grams of protein) in Africa. Large variations are also seen in terms of food system efficiency, ranging from 15-20% in North America to 80-90% in Africa. Understanding regional inefficiencies, inequalities and trade imbalances will be crucial to meet the needs of a growing global population. This case is exemplified in India-specific framework results. India's domestic production capacity would result in severe malnutrition across a large proportion (>60%) of the population (even under ambitious yield and waste reduction scenarios) in 2030/50. This shortfall will have to be addressed through optimised intervention and trade developments. This work also explores a number of solutions which couple improved nutritional outcomes with sustainability. Analyses of global and national nutritional guidelines conclude that most are incompatible with climate targets; the recommended USA or Australian diet provides minimal emissions savings relative to the business-as-usual diet in 2050. Low-cost, high-quality protein will remain a crucial element in developing an effective and sustainable food system. This research explores the potential of two sources. Results find that meat substitute products have significant health and emission benefits, but are strongly sensitive to both price and consumer acceptability. The environmental impact of aquaculture is strongly species-dependent. This study provides the first quantification of global greenhouse gas emissions from aquaculture, estimated to be 227±61 MtCO2e (approximately 3-4% of total livestock emissions). This is projected to increase to 365±99MtCO2e by 2030.

<p>Sustainably meeting the food demands of a growing population based on finite resources while protecting the environment is one of the great challenges of humanity in the coming decades. This dissertation combines three essays that examine how future patterns of global food consumption will affect human health, and how the food system changes driven by the ongoing global nutrition transition will affect the environment. The production of food needed to meet a growing population combined with changes in food consumption patterns are placing unprecedented levels of stress on the planet’s scarce natural resources. In this context, while the existing literature has mainly focused on increasing production, the magnitude of loss and waste is too large to be ignored. The first essay contributes to the literature by examining the linkages between consumers’ food waste at the national level on the one hand, and global food security and environmental health on the other hand. Absent significant behavioral changes or successful policy interventions, food waste will nearly double by 2050. Emerging economies are likely to play a key role in driving this growth in global food waste. Further findings indicate that the global benefits of food waste mitigation are greatly enhanced in the context of a more open international trade regime. Yet even as food loss and waste has been undernutrition and overweight/obesity levels have also been increasing. Together, these trends form a triple challenge for food security, global sustainability and human health. In the second essay I examine the role of the excessive calorie availability as an historical driver of adult BMI. I find that, in part driven by excess in calorie availability, individuals in more recent cohorts are overweight or obese earlier and for larger proportions of their lifespan than those in earlier cohorts. This highlights the potential for unintended health consequences of agricultural and trade policies directed at increasing calorie supplies. In the third essay I introduce a novel framework that extends the UN-FAO’s methodology for assessing undernutrition to also assess the extent of overconsumption and obesity. This framework allows for examination of the dynamics of the double burden of malnutrition between 2015 and 2050. Specifically, this framework shows how shifting towards healthier and more sustainable food consumption levels and reducing food waste could synergistically address multiple health and environmental burdens. </p>

The Philippines is a food extractive enclave in the bust stage of export-oriented aquaculture, and this globalization agenda has had several negative impacts. Aquaculture has not expanded fish and marine foods but threatens national food security by integrating Philippine aquatic resources into the globalized food chain. Following structural adjustment policies imposed beginning in the 1980s, the Philippines shipped massive levels of animal protein to world markets, but this country has grown less food self-sufficient. During the decades that shrimp aquaculture has boomed and busted in the Philippines, the living conditions of Filipino families have steadily worsened. This study of three Panguil Bay fishing communities of Northern Mindanao demonstrates that the survival of subsistent artisan fisher households is now threatened because export-oriented producers have severely degraded the ecosystem upon which they rely. Moreover, women and children are inequitably threatened by the ecological and economic changes that have accompanied the Philippine global aquaculture agenda. In reality, capitalist commodity chains of export-oriented aquaculture externalize to households and to nature much of the true cost of producers and of ecological degradation. As a result, malnourished and impoverished Philippine fishing households subsidize global aquaculture commodity chains. While Filipino fisher households can no longer afford local food costs, their hidden inputs into capitalist commodity chains keep prices of luxury seafoods cheap in rich core countries. / Ph. D.

The research focuses on understanding the gap between trade openness and food security complexity. Existing literature has examined trade openness's effect on food security indicators and stated that it has a positive impact. However, this is the first study that has examined this relationship holistically. Food insecurity is at its worst in Africa, and the continent is highly dependent on trade. Hence, the paper aims to investigate if trade openness impacts food security overall in Africa, using the Global Food Security Index as a proxy indicator. It also examines whether the individual four dimensions of food security are impacted. The research conducts a quantitative analysis with secondary panel data to fulfill this objective. The data span from 2012 to 2021, and 23 African countries were included. The paper employs The Newey–West estimator with OLS to address existing autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity in the data. In this study, globalization was added as a substitute for trade openness to improve the robustness of the trade openness impact on the Global Food Security Index in a separate model. The results reveal that trade openness does not significantly relate to Food security overall or in specific dimensions. Globalization, on the other hand, has a positive impact on food security overall and in three out of the four dimensions. The result suggests that globalization is Africa's primary driver of food security rather than trade openness.

Local food systems (LFS) connect producers and consumers in a geographically restricted food supply chain. Local food advocates argue that limiting the spatial scope of food systems can help to address the sustainability challenges present in the global food system. LFS are argued to eliminate intermediaries, enable clear product provenance, encourage community interactions, and involve few food miles. LFS are growing in Sweden, where the government launched a National Food Strategy in 2016, which among other aims promotes the proliferation of local food. This study aims to understand why several farmers from Uppland, central Sweden engage in local selling and whether concerns about sustainability influence the choice of selling channels among them. Using on-farm, semi-structured interviews with the farmers, this research explores three research questions concerning: (1) farmer motives for engaging in local selling channels, (2) factors constraining farmer involvement in LFS, and (3) farmer perceptions on the future of local selling channels. The overall purpose of this research is to provide a critical perspective on local selling as a sustainable food system solution. The study reveals a wide range of motives, including economic advantages from responding to consumer demand and cutting out middlemen, price premiums, more customer interactions, job satisfaction, and proximity to markets. Various economic and personal constraints limit the farmers’ use of local selling channels. Such constraints include seasonality of produce, performing time-consuming middlemen tasks, limited access to essential infrastructure, low transport load utilisation, and individual reasons for not wanting to up-scale local production. The results indicate that better access to on-farm or nearby infrastructure, improved small-scale efficiency, increasing food prices for consumers, changing consumer preferences, more diverse farm products, and better congruency between government objectives and import policies could all help to support LFS in the future. This research exposes a number of underlying contradictions and tensions associated with local food in the literature and among the interviewed farmers. The study finds that sustainability concerns are not a critical motive for the farmers’ involvement in local selling. Some of the farmers even question the sustainability of such channels and challenge the idea that LFS are inherently more sustainable than food systems on other scales. Furthermore, almost all the farmers are involved in both local and global food systems. The farmers do not find it conflicting to be part of both food systems, and are in fact consciously using both systems to their economic advantage. Thus the clear distinction between local and global food systems made in the LFS literature is not reflected in the practical experiences of the farmers involved in this study.

Wheat plays an important role in ensuring the global food security. Salinity of soil and water poses a major threat to its production and it affects both growth and development of wheat in a negative way. Wheat plants uses certain molecular mechanisms to adapt themselves under the salt stress.Transcription factor proteins are the proteins that control the response of the wheat towards abiotic stress like salinity.There are 56 transcription factor protein families in the wheat genome. However these transcription factor protein families are not classified into subfamilies.The main goal of this research study is to understand how machine learning algorithm can be used to identify and cluster the transcription factor proteins into sub families that can help in associating them with specific biological processes like salt stress. In this project K Mean Clustering method is used to cluster the WRKY transcription factor family into subfamilies. WRKY is identified and clustered into three distinct clusters. Cluster validation is performed using external validation and resulted in 90% validation score. This method can be applied to other transcription factor families also. This can ultimately be helpful in producing salt-tolerant varieties of the wheat that are resistant to abiotic stress like salinity and this can help to improve crop yield.

L’agriculture biologique (AB) est souvent présentée comme une alternative prometteuse à l’agriculture conventionnelle, permettant des systèmes alimentaires durables tout en minimisant les impacts environnementaux. La capacité de l’AB à satisfaire la demande alimentaire mondiale reste néanmoins fortement débattue. Plusieurs études ont conclu que l’AB pourrait satisfaire la demande alimentaire globale à condition de réduire simultanément la consommation de produits animaux et les gaspillages. Cependant, ces études n’ont pas pleinement pris en compte les changements d’assolement et de choix d’espèces lorsque les systèmes conventionnels sont convertis en AB. Surtout, ils ont ignoré le rôle clé de la disponibilité en azote (N) dans le maintien des rendements en AB. Dans cette étude, nous avons d’abord réalisé une méta-analyse comparant les rotations de cultures en agriculture biologique et conventionnelle à l’échelle mondiale. Sur la base de ces résultats, nous avons développé une cartographie des espèces cultivées à l’échelle globale sous un scénario de fort développement de l’AB. Nous avons ensuite estimé la production alimentaire grâce au développement de GOANIM (Global Organic Agriculture NItrogen Model), un modèle biophysique et spatialement explicite d’optimisation linéaire simulant le cycle de l’azote (N) et ses effets sur la production alimentaire globale. GOANIM est adapté au cas de l’AB et simule les flux d'azote entre les terres cultivées, les animaux d'élevage et les prairies permanentes, ainsi qu’entre les systèmes agricoles biologiques et conventionnels. Le modèle optimise les populations d’élevage à l’échelle locale afin de maximiser l’approvisionnement en N provenant du fumier, ce qui maximise la production issue des terres cultivées, tout en minimisant la concurrence exercée par les animaux pour les ressources alimentaires. GOANIM a été utilisé pour simuler l’offre alimentaire sous plusieurs scénarios de conversion à l’AB. Ces résultats ont été comparés à différentes estimations de la demande alimentaire mondiale. Nous montrons que la carence en N risque d’être un facteur limitant majeur de la production en AB, entraînant une réduction de -37% de la disponibilité alimentaire à l’échelle globale sous un scénario de conversion à l’AB de 100%. Nous montrons que des taux de conversions inférieurs (jusqu'à 60% des terres agricoles), en coexistence avec l'agriculture conventionnelle, permettent de satisfaire la demande alimentaire mondiale si cette conversion est associée à une évolution conjointe de la demande, telle que la réduction de l'apport énergétique par individu ou du gaspillage alimentaire. Ces travaux contribuent de manière substantielle à mieux comprendre le rôle que l’AB peut jouer dans la transition vers des systèmes alimentaires équitables et durables. Ils indiquent également des voies à suivre pour parvenir à la sécurité alimentaire mondiale. / Organic agriculture is often proposed as a promising approach to achieve sustainable food systems while minimizing environmental impacts. Its capacity to meet the global food demand remains, however, debatable. Some studies have investigated this question and have concluded that organic farming could satisfy the global food demand provided that animal product consumption and food waste are reduced. However, these studies have not fully considered the changes in the type of crops grown that occur when conventional farming systems are converted to organic farming. Most importantly, they also have missed a critical ecological phenomenon by not considering the key role that nitrogen (N) cycling plays in sustaining crop yields in organic farming. In this study, we first carried out a global meta-analysis comparing organic vs conventional crop rotations. Based on these results, we developed global spatial explicit maps of the type of crop grown if organic farming was to drastically expand. We then estimated organic global food production using GOANIM (Global Organic Agriculture NItrogen Model), a spatially explicit, biophysical and linear optimization model simulating N cycling in organically managed croplands and its feedback effects on food production. GOANIM explores N flows between croplands, livestock animals and permanent grasslands, and with conventional farming systems. The model optimizes livestock populations at the local scale in order to maximize N supply from livestock manure – hence maximizing cropland production –, while minimizing the animals’ competition for grain food resources. We used GOANIM to simulate several supply-side scenarios of global conversion to organic farming. We then compared the outcomes of these scenarios with different estimates of the global demand, thus leading to complete exploration of the global production-demand options space. We show N deficiency would be a major limiting factor to organic production in a full organic world, leading to an overall -37% reduction in global food availability. Nevertheless, we also show that lower conversion shares (up to 60%) would be feasible in coexistence with conventional farming when coupled with demand-side solutions, such as reduction of the per capita energy intake or food wastage. This work substantially contributes to advancing our understanding of the role that organic farming may play to reach fair and sustainable food systems, and it indicates future pathways for achieving global food security.