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World Hunger and the Global Economy: Strong Linkages, Weak Action

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This paper probes some of the global economic forces that have contributed to the oitgoing precarious global food security situation, especially in the years since the 2007 to 2008 food crisis. Since the crisis hit at a time when global food production per capita was rising, it is important that policies addressing hunger incorporate dimensions beyond food production. There has been some acknowledgement of the role of global economic forces in the food crisis by global policymakers, but global food security initiatives still largely emphasize increased food production over other measures. The paper concludes that more needs to be done to ensure that the rules that govern the global economy—especially those regarding international trade, finance, and investment—do not work against the goal of food security.
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... It also shows the place of transition economies among economies of other countries. Clapp (2014), addressed the global problems of hunger, poverty and proposed some economic ways of their solution. Some Ukrainian articles are focused on financial crises as the form of globalization manifestation (Bodrov, 2014;Lysenko, 2014;Stukalo, 2010). ...
... Cluster means for clusters[1][2][3][4] ...
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The study of various aspects of social economy is stipulated by the fact that the focus of any economic system is the human being as the main object and the result of economic activity. The purpose of this paper is to cluster of social economies of the countries throughout the world with distinguishing the models of social economy for transition economies under globalization conditions. The results of research represent four clusters of social economy that prove validity of classification of 4 classic models of social economy: Liberal, Scandinavian, corporatist, and Mediterranean. While the most developed countries have effective models of social economy, there is still no clear concept of social development for transition economies. This paper deals with social economy clustering of different countries with the view to determinate the place of transition economies in social metrics of global economy. Our study is limited to the number of countries - 40 countries of the world, mainly European, and timeframes - 2015 and 2016. The obtained results could be taken into account by governments when developing and implementing new social policy for transition economies considering the experience of countries with classical social models. The authors propose the main practical tools for transition social model. It is proposed to distinguish one more model of social economy - the transition model, typical for transition economies that implement social reforms and has some common features.
... Genellikle odak noktası gıda üretiminin arttırılmasına, piyasaların ve bu alandaki yatırımların desteklenmesine yöneliktir. Böylesi bir odak noktasının da yine uluslararası politik iktisat içerisinde gıda güvencesinin yürütülmesi sürecindeki devlet-piyasa önceliği/gücü ve bağımlılık ilişkileri ile şekillendiği de unutulmamalıdır (Clapp, 2014). Gıda güvencesinin sağlanmasında mikro (birey/hanehalkı), mezzo (topluluk) ve makro (dünya, bölgeler, uluslar) düzeydeki toplumsal örgütlenme belirleyici ve şekillendirici olmaktadır (Gross vd.,2000). ...
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Temel bir ihtiyaç olan gıda, gıda hakkı ve güvencesi bağlamında ele alınabilecek bir konudur. Gıdayı toplayan, dağıtan, tamamlayıcı gıda ve öğün sağlayan kurumlar olarak gıda bankalarının oluşturulmasında gıda ve gıdaya erişimin temel bir insan hakkı olduğu gerçeği ile hareket edilebileceği gibi yardımseverlik ve hayırseverlik motivasyonları da belirleyici olabilir. Gıda bankalarını tartışmaya açık hale getiren nokta, gıda bankalarının ve sağladıkları desteklerin uzun vadedeki sürdürülebilirliği ve yeterliliği üzerinedir. Ayrıca, gıda bankalarının varlığı ve yaygınlığı devletin kendisine ait bir sorumluluk alanından çekilmesi ve bu alandaki sorumluluğunu yerine getirmemesi şeklinde de yorumlanmaktadır. Liberal refah devleti örneklerinden İngiltere’deki ve Kanada’daki gıda bankalarının varlığı üzerinden sosyal destek sistemlerinin ve devlet-birey ilişkilerinin yapısına bu çalışmada yer verilmeye çalışılacaktır. COVID-19 ile mücadele kapsamında alınan önlemler ve politikalar gıda bankalarını da doğrudan ve dolaylı şekilde etkilemiştir. Bu nedenle, son dönemde ortaya çıkan küresel pandeminin gıda bankalarına yönelik talep üzerindeki etkisine de yer verilecektir.
... Both of these outcomes have been observed by researchers and have been strongly associated with negative impacts on health and the environment (Hall et al. 2009;Hic et al. 2016;Vandevijvere et al. 2015;Vulcano and Ciccarese 2017;Weis 2007). Overproduction represents a well-known area of scholarship into global food systems, generally with an emphasis on agricultural dumping, aid, trade and global geopolitics (Clapp 2014;McMichael 2009;Pritchard 2012), but has only recently been posited as a key influencing factor of food waste, with more work needed to fully explore these dynamics. ...
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Preventing food waste is a major global challenge to the sustainability and security of the environment, society and economy. In response to that challenge, a plethora of initiatives addressing food waste have formed in recent years. These initiatives focus on aspects such as the efficiency of resource use, reduction of supply chain food waste, food donations and rescue, consumer behaviour, and above all, innovative ways to add value to food surplus and waste. What many initiatives have in common is that they mainly deal with food waste once it exists rather than preventing it from occurring in the first place, which might thwart efforts to increase long-term food systems sustainability. The idea of food waste prevention itself is beset by several conceptual paradoxes: it is considered the most preferred method to manage waste—which it was supposed to prevent in the first place, and it is an ambiguous ecological behaviour lacking the tangible characteristics of waste composting or recycling (i.e. prevention by its nature is invisible). Most importantly, food waste prevention, like other major sustainability challenges, appears to be in a fundamental conflict of interest with current economic norms and practices. In response to these dissonances of prevention and the inability of waste management to reduce the creation of food waste, researchers have proposed a number of new approaches, including the re-appraisal of food overproduction as a key cause of food waste. Accepting Mourad’s (Environ Soc Berkeley J Sociol 59:26–33, 2015) challenge to “think outside the bin”, this work proposes a “Prevention Paradox” framing as a conceptual link between the bodies of research on food overproduction and food waste prevention, offering a more holistic approach to this major sustainability challenge.
... Scientist C. Geldsdorf (Gelsdorf, 2010) emphasized the humanitarian challenges of globalization. As an alternative, J. Clapp (Clapp, 2014), S. Muthayya and others (Muthayya et al., 2013) focused their research on the global problem of hunger, demonstrating how it affects developing countries. The negative aspects of globalization were emphasized by scholar N. A. Eckes (Eckes, 2011). ...
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Мета дослідження – проаналізувати соціалізацію економіки як фактор вирішення глобальних проблем у сучасних умовах. Дизайн/Підхід/Метод дослідження. Застосовано загальнонаукові методи: систематизації, порівняння, узагальнення, аналізу та синтезу. Результати дослідження. Проаналізовано сучасні глобальні проблеми та виклики розвитку. Роз’яснено зв'язок між глобальними проблемами й викликами та типами країн світу. Визначено основні глобальні проблеми для країн, що розвиваються. Запропоновано вирішення глобальних проблем за допомогою управління потенціалом соціалізації економіки. Теоретичне значення дослідження – розвинуто думку щодо потенціалу соціалізації у вирішенні глобальних проблем та викликів. Практичне значення дослідження полягає у можливості застосування його результатів глобальними суб’єктами (міжнародними організаціями, корпораціями та окремими державами) в управлінні та вирішенні глобальних проблем. Оригінальність/Цінність/Наукова новизна дослідження – розподілено глобальні проблеми за типами країн світу. Визначено напрямки застосування потенціалу соціалізації економіки у вирішенні глобальних проблем. Перспективи подальших досліджень – вивчати фінансові спроможності соціалізації у вирішенні глобальних проблем та викликів сучасного розвитку країн світу. Тип статті – теоретична.
... Evidence indicates that fluctuations in global energy prices had little effect on staple agricultural prices, and that biofuel production cannot account for the acute spike in global food prices that occurred in 2008 and 2011 (Gilbert, 2010;Mayer, 2012). The role that financial actors have played in influencing global food prices has consequently received increased attention in the academic literature (Martin and Clapp, 2015;Clapp, 2014aClapp, , 2014bIsakson, 2014;Burch and Lawrence, 2009). ...
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Global food price volatility began shortly after Gorton and Rouwenhorst (2004, 2006) recognized that commodity index speculation was financially underexploited by institutional investors. Pro-commodity speculation and pro-index speculation arguments were not new, but gained new significance when the US Mortgage and Global Financial crises began to unfold and investors were looking for new places to funnel money. The literature has linked financial speculation by index funds and hedge funds to global food price volatility and the food riots in 2008 and 2011. The literature, however, leaves readers with the perception that index funds and hedge funds alone created the recent wave of commodity futures speculation. This paper argues that a small but important group of intellectuals were vital to the promotion and regulation of commodity speculation by index funds and hedge funds, which has affected the world as a whole.
... Indeed, measures to increase food production are prominently featured in the World Bank-sponsored Global Agriculture and Food Security Program and the G8 New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, among other initiatives supported by powerful actors. This agenda should be critiqued for its flaws, and I actively engage in this critique myself (Clapp and Murphy, 2013;Clapp, 2014). But I think it only confuses matters to conflate the mainstream agenda that prioritizes production with the broader and more open-ended concept of 'food security'. ...
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The terms food security and food sovereignty originally emerged as separate terms to describe different things. The former is a concept that describes a condition regarding access to adequate food, while the latter is more explicitly a political agenda for how to address inadequate access to food and land rights. Over the past decade, the critical food studies literature has increasingly referred to these terms as being oppositional to each rather than relational to one another. This commentary reflects on the emergence and rationale behind this binary and argues that the current oppositional frame within the literature is problematic in several ways. First, critics of food security have inserted a rival normative agenda into what was originally a much more open-ended concept. Second, the grounds on which that normative agenda is assigned to food security are shaky on several points. Given these problems, the commentary argues that the juxtaposition of food security and food sovereignty as competing terms is in many ways more confusing than helpful to policy dialogue on questions of hunger and the global food system.
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A world without hunger demands a post-growth rewiring of the global agrifood system predicated on emancipatory politics that enables reform of actors and institutions outside agriculture. This is necessary to shift out of the prevalent growth-hegemonic framing of agriculture and its contributions to economic growth, where the structural injustice of hunger is rendered invisible. Recent International Relations (IR) scholarship highlights the institutional arrangements underpinning global agrifood problems. This paper uses critical IR theory to understand the structural mechanisms and relations of power through which the growth-hegemonic theorisation of agriculture is produced and reproduced, sustaining hunger within an exceedingly financialised agro-industrial complex. The structural power of knowledge shaping the interlocking structures of finance, production, and security is evident in the extremely high multilevel concentration in modern agrifood systems. This structural power evident in local decentralised agroecological systems and in transnational agrarian movements reflects post-growth principles of sufficiency, shared prosperity, care, ecological and social justice.Together, they are the counter-hegemonic voices, cooperative social systems, and class interests championed by post-growth politics.
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