How our researchers are finding solutions to the world’s food issues
As World Food Day approaches, we showcase the leading research carried out by the Faculty of Social Sciences into the food issues and the future of food.
According to the organisation behind World Food Day, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2.8 billion people in the world are unable to afford a healthy diet.
Unhealthy diets are behind all types of malnutrition – undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies and obesity – which exist in most countries.
Researchers from the Faculty of Social Sciences work with policy makers, charities and NGOs (non-governmental organisations) to open up the conversation around food and to change legislation in order to improve people’s access to sustainable, nutritious food.
Junk food and policy obstruction in Europe
Many vulnerable people do not have access to nutritious foods and have to rely on unhealthy, cheaper ultra-processed food.
Dr Clare Patton from the School of Law is a lead author of a recent damning WHO/Europe report blaming four industries – including the ultra-processed food industry – for 2.7 million deaths every year in Europe.
Her research supports growing evidence that industries including the junk food industry are behind the rise in NCDs (noncommunicable diseases), such as cardiovascular diseases and cancer, due to their ‘harmful’ marketing practises and obstruction of NCD policy implementation.
The report calls for governments to impose stronger regulations on these health-harming products, one example of how the Faculty’s researchers are influencing policy at every level.
Supermarkets and the right to food
Dr Clare James, Lecturer in Law, School of Law, researches how the right to food could be implemented in the UK, aiming to create a rights-based approach to many components of AgriFood supply chains, including government policy relating to agriculture and food, the role of international trade, and the importance of stake-holder participation from small holders to large multinational corporations.
Join Clare’s World Food Day webinar: ‘Supermarkets and the Right to Food in the UK’ hosted by The Global Food and Environment Institute (GFEI). The webinar discusses the multiple ways supermarkets interact with the right to food. It then engages with the normative content of the right to food to propose government interventions to limit possible negative impacts of supermarkets on the realisation of the right to food.
Register for free on TicketSource.
Read Clare’s article Resilient Food Systems and the Right to Food here.
The nuanced landscape of food waste
Despite the world’s farmers producing enough food for everyone, around 733 million people go hungry due to causes such as climate change, war and pandemics. Shockingly, a third of all food produced globally is thrown away.
The School of Law’s expert in Environmental Law and Food Waste, Dr Carrie Bradshaw was seconded to the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) and commissioned to write a major report on food waste. By demonstrating the limited evidence base for voluntary measures, the report provides an underpinning case for new legislation to prevent food waste.
While previous efforts have focussed on reducing household waste, changes are needed right across the supply chain. Watch Carrie Bradshaw’s video about her report here.
The politics of food
We live in a time of profound uncertainty and anxiety around food. Food is not only a necessity for survival, but also fulfils multiple, and often conflicting, social roles: it is a site of pleasure and conviviality; a locus of familial tension and conflict; a source of everyday labour; a marker of identity; an axis of inequality; and a domain of fear, anxiety and shame.
Karen Throsby’s 2023 book Sugar Rush explores sugar’s rise to infamy over the last decade and reveals how competing understandings of the ‘problem’ of sugar are smoothed over through appeals to science and the demonisation of fatness in ways that entrench rather than address social inequalities. Karen’s work on sugar has featured in The Guardian, Vittles magazine, and popular food podcasts such as Can I Have Another Snack?, Rethinking Wellness, The Bunker and Your Parenting Mojo.
Seasonal migrants: their role in UK food security
Raspberry pickers, UK
In the UK, the food and agriculture industry relies on seasonal farm workers (over 90% of whom are migrants) to plant, harvest and pack fruit and vegetables.
In ESRC-funded project Feeding the Nation, Dr Roxana Barbulescu (PI) working with Dr Bethany Robertson and researchers at the University of Oxford, working with partners Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) examined the experiences of seasonal agricultural migrant workers and farmers and the contemporary drivers of seasonal migration. To make visible the contributions of migrant workers to UK food availability a series of exhibitions with illustrations from the project were hosted by the Museum of English or Rural Life and a folk song with Peddler Russell duo.
Findings from this research project support Defra’s policy interventions to mitigate risks for the UK’s food supply and informed the DEFRA-led review on automation in horticulture. A subsequent study for Low Pay Commission, examined the application on the accommodation offset – a provision of national minimum wage (NMW) – for seasonal workers living in caravans on farms supported the recommendation of the Commissioners and was published in a report in 2024.
A 2023 Food Standards Agency (FSA) study conducted by N8 AgriFood researchers and our own Dr Roxana Barbulescu, identifies food security risks caused by labour shortages including migrant recruitment and retention. The study be used by the Food Standards Authority (FSA) to map out risks and develop resilience to improve the nation’s food security and availability.
Watch Roxana summarise the issues around food security and the efforts research organisations around the world are making to deliver sustainable agriculture and nature planet-friendly solutions here.
Improving food security in the Global South
Agrifood systems are vulnerable to unrest, climate change and other disasters, and with a growing world population, food security has become a major global challenge. Research in the School of Politics and International Studies examines how agribusiness can work with communities to improve their food security.
In Zambia, Dr Simon Manda’s research uses the test case of global sugar corporations to highlight complex issues of livelihoods and food production and the need for agribusinesses to do more in community spaces they operate to ensure direct and indirect food security.
His research shows that a focus on non-food communities for exports can compromise land availability, access and utilisation, affecting all dimensions of food security (see Manda, S., Tallontire, A. and Dougill, A.J., 2018. Outgrower schemes, livelihoods and response pathways on the Zambian ‘sugarbelt’. Geoforum, 97, pp.119-130).
Simon Manda is also researching on how pandemics such as COVID-19 heighten questions of not only food availability and access, but also the role and importance of shorter value chains that can be locally appropriate (Manda, S., 2023. Inside Zambia's ‘new normal:’COVID‐19 policy responses and implications for peri‐urban food security and livelihoods. Journal of International Development, 35(6), pp.1099-1120.).
He shows that a right to food for a better life and a better future requires a consideration of socially and culturally appropriate perspectives to production and consumption patterns.
Whose right to food are we protecting?
Batad village, Philippines
While continuing his work as a development practitioner, Mel Fatric Rhai Yan is completing a PhD in the School of Politics and International Studies on the subject of food systems inequality in the Global South, especially in the Philippines.
His research talks about the need for a more radical transformation in ensuring inclusive food security. He is specifically exploring the practicability of food sovereignty (the right of people to control their own food system and determine their own food policies) as an alternative agrifood systems model and, in the process, exposing its theoretical and practical gaps.
Mel foremostly argues that our desire to eat healthy and sustainably produced food does not necessarily protect the livelihood of local smallholder farmers, whilst the struggle for fairer markets for local farmers can marginalise poor consumers and can invalidate the globalisation of taste. His intention, therefore, is to allow people to reflect: Whose right to food are we protecting? And in the process, whose better life and better future are we securing?
