Food Insecurity: The Future Challenge

At a time where the amount of food produced worldwide is sufficient to feed all, the number of food-insecure people remains high. This article presents an analysis of a number of futures studies on food and agriculture, at both local and global scale, and using quantitative and qualitative methods, with a specific focus on how they frame and address food security. After identifying future key drivers of change, implications for food security are discussed. The results show that futures studies in agriculture are entering into a third generation where key drivers of change include social and political forces as potential sources of discontinuities. It is proposed to move the field of futures studies from the exploration of food security to the exploration of food insecurity, whose multiple roots are anchored in social, political, economic and institutional dimensions, and to focus these future studies on ruptures and discontinuities rather than trends.