ABSTRACT
The problem of food insecurity has been pervasive and too crucial an issue to ignore as part of economic growth and social stability, particularly in developing countries. The challenge of achieving sustainable and inclusive food security is one of the most salient objectives of development interventions. It is an integral part of human security in the form of the right and need of people to have economic and physical access to sufficient and quality food for a healthy and active life. Successive global, regional and national measures attempted to address food insecurity by reducing the ‘unacceptably high’ number of people going hungry (FAO, 2012, p 8). They have registered good results, but are still lagging behind, for example, the aim of cutting by half the number of people hungry by 2015. More than half of the world population lives in coastal areas, increasingly
occupying vast watersheds that may drain to the coast (Nakamura, 2011).1
Population pressure in coastal areas of developing countries has exacerbated the state of food insecurity. This appears to be acute in countries which depend on fisheries for protein source, thereby increasing the vulnerability of communities to food insecurity. For example, the Philippines, where the rural population rely on fisheries for 80 per cent of protein, has struggled to cope with nutrient deficiencies due to the rapid decline in fish stock (Castro and D’Agnes, 2008). Similarly, food insecurity induced by climate change as a result of declining coastal fisheries production in Pacific Island countries and territories (PICT) puts at risk this important source of food (50-90 per cent of protein) and livelihoods (50 per cent of income) (Secretariat of the Pacific Community, 2012). In the Chars2 of Bangladesh, lack of access to employment during the lean period, widely known as Monga, worsened by vulnerability to soil erosion and low coping mechanisms, has been the cause of child and maternal malnutrition and migration of men to urban areas in search of temporary work (Zug, 2006; Uraguchi, 2010). Exclusion of the poor and in particular women from changes in fishing technology and market supply chains in the marine fishing communities in the Indian coastal state of Orissa has also increased vulnerability to food insecurity (FAO, 2006). After a variety of economic experimentation, agricultural investment growth
through increased private-sector development, coupled with challenging but
relatively stable macro-economic reforms, enabled the poor to increase their food production and income for access to food. Improvement in food quality and accessibility of affordable public health services contributed to falling child mortality due to malnutrition in countries such as Cambodia (Ecker and Diao, 2011) and India (Claeson et al., 2000), but still remain an obstacle in countries such as Ethiopia and Bangladesh (Uraguchi, 2010). A careful analysis of the progress in addressing food insecurity reveals complexity which requires a range of better coordinated and innovative solutions, such as Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programmes, which are economically viable, socially just and embrace sustainable natural resource management. In fact hunger, the ‘uneasy or painful sensation caused by a lack of food [which is] the recurrent and involuntary lack of access to food’ (Anderson, 1990, p 1598), is now an intractable problem only in very few pockets of the world. There is a burgeoning flow of resources from donors and governments into
income transfer programmes as they provide vast hands-on experience and some good results in complex and challenging contexts by enabling the poor to retain productive assets or continue to make productive investments in food security. As discussed in other sections of this chapter, there has been intense debate on the pros and cons of using cash versus in-kind payments. Income transfer and PES programmes share important features. First, both try to
allocate scarce resources in an efficient and effective manner to address issues which are widely recognized as critical to ensuring sustainable development. As proponents of neoclassical economic thought argue, income (both cash and inkind) is one important factor that significantly influences people’s consumption habits, its availability creating opportunities and hence demands (multiplier effects) to maximize utility, and its lack bringing constraints thereof. Second, the programmes induce behavioural changes of beneficiaries or service
providers in adopting new and/or improved practices to address long-term problems. These include, for example, resource use decisions of individuals and communities, the benefits of which also spill over to broader sections of societies. In other words, PES programmes can serve as one important means of addressing the problem of ‘externalities’, a critical part of classical market failure. In the words of Rodriguez et al. (2011, p 8), PES programmes aim at ‘… internalising an externality in which a payment or reward in kind is transferred to a number of beneficiaries previously identified in a targeting exercise, if they fulfill a set of conditions’. Income transfer programmes also address market failure by applying efficiency
and equity mainly through increasing the participation of the poor, who are usually excluded or trapped in a low-productivity sector of the economy. Studies of income transfer programmes show that, by imposing conditions on the choice of goods, the programmes give incentives to participants, for example, by reducing the ‘fungibility’ problem3 (Das et al., 2005). In addition, income transfer programmes create room for public policy to enable strong institutional foundations for the markets to operate. This addresses the constraints of the poor by providing a ‘stable stream of income’ to households and further inducing them to be ‘willing to undertake more risky’ investments (Fiszbein and Schady, 2009, p 123).
