Food security | EPFL Graph Search

Food security is the availability of food in a country (or geography) and the ability of individuals within that country (geography) to access, afford, and source adequate foodstuffs. According to the United Nations Committee on World Food Security, food security is defined as meaning that all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life. The availability of food irrespective of class, gender or region is another element of food security. There is evidence of food security being a concern many thousands of years ago, with central authorities in ancient China and ancient Egypt being known to release food from storage in times of famine. At the 1974 World Food Conference, the term "food security" was defined with an emphasis on supply; food security is defined as the "availability at all times of adequate, nourishing, diverse, balanced and mode

Civil war hinders crop production and threatens food security in Syria

Xi Li, Li Mi

Assessing the impact of violent conflict on Syrian agriculture is challenging given data limitations and attributability issues. Using satellite data at 30 m spatial resolution, we found that the extent of productive cropland showed greater interannual variability and spatial heterogeneity after the start of the civil war in 2011. Using changes in satellite-based night-time light as a proxy for war impact intensity, we also found that cropland close to severely impacted urban settlements faced greater disruption. Fixed-effects models revealed the relationship between productive cropland and precipitation for the pre-war period, whereas a counterfactual scenario constructed for the period 2012-2019 showed substantial variation at the regional level. While the ongoing conflict promoted cropland cultivation in safer zones, cropland reduction took place in the country's northwest and southeast regions. Our study demonstrated the combined utility of daytime and night-time satellite data to assess food insecurity in extreme environments and can help guide distribution of food and aid in Syria. Conflicts are known to disrupt agriculture, food supply chains and the economy at large. Mapping and quantifying such disruptions, although key for aid planning, remains a challenge in war zones. This study uses daytime and night-time satellite data from Syria over 1998-2019 to assess the link between war-induced impacts on infrastructure and urban areas with cropland dynamics.

NATURE PORTFOLIO2022

Sustainable Food Supply

Simone Lydia Voldrich

In the context of a growing world population, the fundamental need for foodstuff makes a sustainable management of the food supply an imperative. Sustainability issues in the food supply chain range from responsible use of limited resources, safe and secure food supply, minimizing food waste, while maintaining economic interests of each player. A novel ap- proach is presented integrating Processing Time, Cost and Operational Risk (PTCORk1) in one quantitative model. It allows for designing Pareto optimal monitoring systems. In a com- parative study, exact and (meta) heuristic methods are compared for best performance. The study with real-world data from an international food company is based on a common and widely consumed foodstuff with typical sustainable food supply chain challenges. Results are thus generalizable to other value chains in the food industry. It provides novel understanding of the seeming contradiction between Processing Time & Cost (PTC) and Operational Risk (ORk). On the system level, the efficient frontier reveals a quantified non-linear relationship. Within the monitoring system the relative contribution of each monitoring activity to the objective function shows a saturation effect enabling practicioners to identify critical monitor- ing activities and engage in step-by-step optimization. Evidence is presented that favorable solutions reveal potential for equidistribution of operational risks and time- and cost-efficient risk allocation. The advantages of a multi-objective approach are compared to either single objective approach. Away from conflicting formulations of minimal operational risk, process- ing time and cost, the approach fosters a more differentiated and quantifiable understanding of the relationship of processing time, cost and operational risk enabeling decision makes to formulate advantageous trade-offs. Optimized scenarios are tested for robustness and potential multiplicatory effects by numerical simulation of a connected dynamic supply chain environment. The approach provides valuable insights for practitioners and enables specific actions for a sustainable and competitive food supply.

EPFL2017

Community-based landslide risk reduction: a review of a Red Cross soil bioengineering for resilience program in Honduras

Silvia Hostettler

Effective long-term participation of communities in disaster risk reduction measures in landslide-prone areas continues to be a challenge. This study aims to evaluate the extent to which community-based soil-bioengineering techniques allow for effective mitigation of shallow landslide events given technical, environmental, economic and socio-cultural sustainability criteria. The Red Cross has been implementing community-based disaster risk reduction programs aimed at increasing resilience at the community level in Honduras since 2005. Since 2010, 230 landslide hazard sites have been stabilized using soil-bioengineering measures (the use of living plant material to provide certain engineering functions) based on a carefully and systematically developed partnership with local communities. In 2018, an assessment of 73 sites established between 2010 and 2014 showed that (1) 83% of the sites were adequately maintained and (2) 69% of the sites fulfilled the function of soil stabilization. A cost-benefit analysis was conducted for two sites and indicated a cost-benefit ratio of 4.5 and 6 respectively. Some of the key factors for these high success rates include the fact that bioengineering is a locally adapted, easily implemented, cost-effective technology that offers landowners multiple benefits by increasing food security and creating income-generation opportunities. The Red Cross has recognized the importance of empowering communities by building self-confidence so that they can ultimately take responsibility for their own future. The creation of well-functioning local emergency committees has proven highly effective in achieving this goal. When adequately trained, these committees are able to support the replication and maintenance of disaster-risk reduction measures at the community-level in the long term. This case study supports the hypothesis that carefully designed participatory approaches are essential for achieving sustainable, long-term transformative change and risk reduction.

2019