Ensuring a Food Secure Future: Ingredients for Change

This media toolkit of 6 pages, published by Panos London, attempts to answer the question: What can journalists do to ensure that hunger is a prominent issue in the media? According to Panos, 600 million people will regularly go hungry, unless there are changes in food security policies. The document explains that, not only weather conditions, but also conditions set by international financial institutions, socio-economic inequalities, corruption, agricultural trade, and HIV/AIDS can all contribute to a decline in food security, which can in turn lead to famine. According to researchers, violent conflicts are behind many food crises. Issues of social inclusion and gender often dictate who has access to food and to the land, financial credit, and education to obtain it.



Topical sections are strucured to support media involvement in the issue of food security with key background information and key questions that the media can ask researchers.
Topics include:

• Threats to food security;
• Government policy and international institutions;
• Conflict;
• HIV/AIDS;
• How ordinary people cope;
• How food security can be improved;
• Lessons learned from research; and
• The role of the media

Examples of government policy ineffectiveness and international institutional errors are used in the toolkit to illustrate how background data from case studies can be useful to journalists. Sections with strategic information about food security highlight topics where media can efffectively use academic research. They include:

• broad distribution to farmers of early warnings on weather change patterns;
• possible economic interventions, like price stabilisation or reducing trade barriers;
• monitoring the debate on genetically modified crops; and
• supporting small-scale agriculture.

The lessons learned section cites two lessons from research. First, according to this document, a strong, stable, accountable government boosts food security. Second, there is a need to coordinate health policy with agricultural policy as HIV/AIDS becomes a factor in loss of ability and know-how for food production in developing countries.

The media, according to this document, have a crucial and ongoing role in focusing on and broadening the debate on food security, through highlighting academic research.