The Environment-Development Nexus: How Climate Change and Ecological Limits Threaten Food Security in South Asia

• In Event: 473 - Section on Political Economy of the World-System Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Section on Political Economy of the World-System Roundtables (one-hour). Table 01. Environment

Abstract

Development processes have trans-spatial socioecological consequences as is evident in the fragile food security regime in South Asia, which is the most populous subregion across all three continents. In 2014, it ranked second from bottom, only above sub-Saharan Africa, on the Global Food Security Index, measured in terms of availability, affordability, and quality and safety of food. This fragility cannot be explained without highlighting the environment-development nexus, which undergirds the region’s ecosocial systems, such as food production and food security. Some experts, especially Nobel-laureate Amartya Sen, segregate food security from its ecological base, overemphasizing governance or in Sen’s terms “food entitlement.” Without diminishing the significance of food governance or the political economy of food security, this paper accentuates the environment-development nexus to highlight the interdependence of food security and its productive ecological base. Specifically, it explores three major ecological constraints linked to the region’s fragile food security regime: global climate change, pre-existing ecological limits, and class-based food culture, which account for decreasing food production and growing food demands. Climate Change has four specific outcomes for the region’s food security regime in declining crop yield, droughts, heatwaves and floods. With only 23.5% of the region’s reported land being arable, climatic consequences further threaten to deplete its productivity. The region’s growing urban middle class and its evolving food culture yield even more pressure on food production. This paper, thus, documents the impact of deteriorating climate and preexisting weak land ecologies in the region on its present and future prospects of food security.

Author

• Tarique Niazi, University of Wisconsin