Assignment 2: Analysis on Food Security. Business & Marketing Essay

Running head: FOOD SECURITY: NIGERIA & BEYOND1
Food Security: Nigeria & Beyond
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FOOD SECURITY: NIGERIA & BEYOND

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Food Security: Nigeria & Beyond


I. Introduction
Food is essential for human life. For millennia, human communities have devised innovative ways to make food accessible and abundant for all. For one, agriculture was one of humanity’s greatest innovation to make food accessible to growing communities in more systematic ways. This arrangement has worked well for millions spread across sparse lands until mid-20th century. The explosion in population growth, coupled by substantial progress in healthcare, has made accelerated demand more – only so in more unequal ways. The shortage of food supplies has, accordingly, given rise to a longstanding yet mistaken argument about lack of food production and, as a result, malnutrition, famines and potential wars. Despite more innovations in food production, particularly using genetic modifying methods, such argument has long clouded decisions made by policy makers and often mislead public opinion about necessity to increase production. The reality of food security is, however, completely different.
Increasingly, access, not volume, is shown to shape past and current food security challenges. Essentially, food, controlled by governments and producers, has been used, or weaponized, as a means of political and economic control. In so doing, governments, producers and, for that matter, all major upstream players are said to control access to, not production of food, to ensure (or not) food security for all or just specific social/racial groups. To put matters into perspective, current report addresses specific issue related to global food security caused by global population growth and poverty in a given country of choice. Three issues are, specifically addressed: (i) policy issue, i.e. food inaccessibility due to underinvestment in IT innovations, (ii) political issue, i.e. political instability, and (iii) social justice issue, i.e. social equality. The
FOOD SECURITY: NIGERIA & BEYOND

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selected country is Nigeria. The underlying reasons justifying selecting Nigeria include, primarily, country’s exploding population growth (Africa’s largest); country’s overdependence on oil, as opposed to more diversified economic development; and, not least, country’s chronic political instability (often amounting to outright armed conflicts) and social disparities. This report addresses, accordingly, food inaccessibility due to underinvestment in technological innovations, political instability and social injustice issues caused by global population growth and poverty in Nigeria by introducing more food production innovations and empowering historically marginalized political/social groups.
This report is made up of five sections: (i) Introduction, (ii) Background, (iii) Technologies That Can Reduce Hunger and Improve Food Security, (iv) Specific Factors in Chosen Developing Country: The Case in Nigeria, and (v) Conclusion. II. Background
The question of definition is critical. That is why, a proper definition of food security should be es...