Universal Food Security: How to End Hunger While Protecting the Planet

by Glenn Denning

What would it take to achieve a genuinely food-secure world—one without hunger or malnutrition, where everyone gets to consume the right quantity and quality of food to live a healthy, active, and productive life? Bringing about such a future requires transforming how our food is grown, managed, and distributed. From production to consumption, food systems must be sustainable, halting environmental degradation and even repairing the damage we have previously done.

This book provides an accessible guide to making healthy diets from sustainable food systems available to all. Glenn Denning bridges the divisive worlds of science, policy, and practice. He synthesizes the most relevant literature and shares personal perspectives and insights gained over four decades working in more than fifty countries, coupled with the real-world experience of hundreds of leading experts. Universal Food Security lays out key priorities—sustainable intensification, market infrastructure, postharvest stewardship, healthy diets, and social protection—and presents how to achieve food systems transformation.

Denning identifies the education and development of practitioner-leaders as the critical trigger of change. Universal Food Security informs and inspires those leaders—acting on their own and with others through institutions—to achieve a food-secure world. This book is an ideal handbook for students and practitioners looking to transform our food systems at all levels.

Genres: Economics, Agriculture

433 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 3, 2023

Reviews

[LINDSAY · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Universal Food Security: How to End Hunger While Protecting the Planet’. Is a major contribution to international research for development. This book’s introductory section is divided into two sections, the first discussing the perennial pessimism that plagues global food production predictions, while the second part deals with the agricultural science revolutions that have kept pace with feeding ever-increasing populations. The second section of the book deals with current knowledge, ranging through the usual components of the agricultural sciences, from soil through water, plant breeding, climate change, human nutrition as well as transformation of food production systems themselves. The third section moves into strategies for ensuring continued progress. These include sustainable intensification intermeshed with market infrastructure, improved postharvest care, healthy diets and the strategies for food security that were current at the time of COVID. The final section, termed ‘Implementation’ highlights the miraculous nature of the vocation of international agricultural science and the need to continue its progress. The book’s strength is, in fact, its basis on a what must have been a very sound lecture series at Columbia University. While there are many books on this subject, and elements that are covered in the book itself, this work unites those elements within a central theme leavened by anecdotes from the author's own experience. In another book this might be seen as a high form of scientific autobiography, but that would be doing the overall publication a disservice because the author uses his own experience to emphasize significant points that he wishes to impart. One hopes that a similarly gifted scientist will amplify the critical role in human nutrition of animal-sourced foods, and of livestock in the livelihoods of many marginalized millions. The book will be an indispensable source for graduate degrees for persons engaged in all fields in international development, not just the agricultural sciences.