Continuing with this theme, EurActiv.com posted an article, “EU’s food imports pose ‘tricky balance’ for hungry Africans,” which discusses the difficulty of creating economic development and food security throughout Africa. A drought that hit East Africa in 2011 exposed this difficulty as European markets had plentiful supplies of African agricultural exports. In fact, the EU imports 40% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s agricultural exports. 

A new World Bank report says that Africa’s farmers can potentially grow enough food to feed the continent and avert future food crises if countries remove cross-border restrictions on food trade within the region. The report goes onto say that Africa has enough fertile farm land, water, and favorable climates to feed itself, yet it is forced to import ever-larger amounts of food from outside the region to keep up with rising demands across the continent.

This book deals with three main food issues in Australia: equity and access to nutritious diets, food production and trade, and the relevance of land use planning for the long-term viability of food production,  articularly around major Australian cities.

A new study finds that Tanzania is one developing country that could actually benefit from climate change by increasing exports of corn to the U.S. and other nations. The study, published in the Review of Development Economics, shows that Tanzania has the potential to substantially increase its maize exports and take advantage of higher commodity prices with a variety of trading partners due to predicted dry and hot weather that could affect those countries' usual sources for the crop.

The Bioenergy Strategy commits the UK Government to further work to investigate the merits of temporarily flexing or otherwise relaxing biofuels mandates at times of agricultural price pressures. The current paper presents work by Defra analysts to explore some of the potential implications of this idea.   

A paper about international trade, consumption-based carbon emissions, and human development

This paper runs a series of future trade liberalisation scenarios using the MAGPIE model and finds that while trade liberalisation lowers food costs it does so at the expense of higher GHG emissions.

This interesting paper by FCRN mailing list member John Ingram, makes the important (but often neglected) point that food security is not just an issue of production, but rather an outcome of multiple social, economic and environmental factors, operating at different scales.

This new book, published by Earthscan, provides a critical assessment of the contemporary global food system in light of the heightening food crisis, as evidence of its failure to achieve food security for the world's population.