Food science has a role to play to achieve food security, but its importance is often seen too high. The assumption that too little food is produced to feed everybody on the planet is incorrect. Actually enough food statistically is around, but not everybody has access to what is available. Food science can cause increase in the cost of food making it unaffordable for poor people.

The Green Revolution is an example for this. High Yielding Varieties cost money, fertilizers, pesticides and other high costs for external inputs make agriculture costly. Still plant science can help to better adapt agriculture for example to a changing climate. One aspect that brings issues around food security together is the sustainable livelihood approach. Of course livelihood security is a concept much broader than food security, but there are a lot of overlaps, especially in times of climate change.....

Crucial is to keep the basis of food production is good shape. Environmental degradation is very dangerous from such perspective. Second is the distribution / access to food, which is to remove poverty. To better understand what is needed one needs to be aware of the different facets of food security.

Food security is a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life

This is how the FAO defines food security. It combines food production, distribution and consumption, looks into cultural and individual food preferences and also at quality aspects of food both from a nutrition perspective as well as from the perspective of food safety. Climate / environmental changes can have impacts on all these aspects, on food production, food distribution / access and food consumption.

Food production and climate change

all food crops have their optimum what climatetic conditons such as temperature, rainfall, etc are concerned. Especially extremes (too cold, too hot, too wet, too dry) can have devasting impacts. Some plants can tolerate a wide range of conditions, while other plants are rather little flexible to adapt to changing climatic conditons. In addition natural hazards (floods, cyclones, droughts) can have devasting impacts destroying crops in the fields. This all does not mean that only negative impacts are from climate change to agriculture. E.G. the temperate zones towards the poles will have warmer climates allowing longer vegetation periods, longer for crops like wheat. The impacts thus have to be established in regional or even sub-regional dimensions.

ccess to food and climate change

this addresses in particular the changes of food prices as a result of climate change. Here in particular countries are effected that already now import big parts of their food requirements, like Kiribati, Tuvalu and other atoll states. Already today food imports make much of their imports and have very negative impacts on their BoP situation. On the micro-level afford rising food prices. They have to change to cheaper foods, often of lesser quality.

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