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(Though I agree that the story seems to present an isolated food shortage in Japan that's not in the midst of a global crisis. That's just not plausible.)
Food security issues threaten communities that not only suffer from shortage in water and fertile lands, but also communities that enjoy the said natural endowments, but yet they fail to invest properly in the said resources. Thus, adopting appropriate policies and strategies are quite important in maintaining and consolidating food security trends, especially in developing countries.
Your post reminded me of this photo I took during my Japan trip, in Choushi, a few hours from Tokyo.Back in the 1970s when I first visited Japan, small vegetable even in the cities were evident. I especially liked the small eggplants.
Ari Tatian said:Food security issues threaten communities that not only suffer from shortage in water and fertile lands, but also communities that enjoy the said natural endowments, but yet they fail to invest properly in the said resources. Thus, adopting appropriate policies and strategies are quite important in maintaining and consolidating food security trends, especially in developing countries.
Yes, good point, Ari!
Im thinking of making every realise that food security means a persons being enable to sustain their own food supply the only way for this for us to realise that too much money is wasted on makinf artificial food and packaging it instead of all that money being used to growin our own food. WHO WANTS TO JOIN ME in makinf the world realise his?
It might be an interesting storyline, but does this really cast any light on how issues of food security emerge and are dealt with in the real world? Not at all. In fact, Episode 1 and 2 are very misleading in this respect.
Why does Tokyo have a food shortage? The story seems to imply that food needs to be produced locally, and that indeed societies need to be self-sufficient to be food secure. In an era of global trade, however, they don't--indeed, the basic principles of international trade suggests that countries ought to focus on the production of products where they have a degree of comparative advantage, and then sell those items to acquire items that they can't produce as efficiently. (There are a lot of qualifiers here, but they're unnecessary for now.) Why produce expensive wheat (like Saudi Arabia does, using desalinated seawater at 17x the world price) when you can buy it far more cheaply from Canada, the US, Argentina, Australia (etc)? Why grow tomatoes in (cold) Montreal, when we can import them more cheaply from (warm) Mexico? And so forth.
In other words, why can't Tokyo buy the food it needs? Why isn't imported food cheaper than the (presumably very expensive) alternative of growing food on rooftops, where the small size of individual plots would mean that one would lose the economies of scale associated with larger areas? Only in a comic book would this be an appropriate response to potential famine.
Food insecurity around the world sometimes arises from local shortage (and high prices), but it also arises from distributional issues, income inequality, increases in global prices (due, for example, to ethanol production), changes in the prices of inputs, politics, taxation policies, war and the use of food/famine as a weapon of war, blockades, environmental change. Western trade protectionism in the agricultural sector is also a key problem for many commodities. It is fascinating--but complex--stuff, and developing appropriate responses involves understanding all of those interrelated, multidimensional social, economic, political environmental factors.
Effective policy responses, and effective social innovation, requires a nuanced understanding on problems and their social context.
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