Food Security

The Modernizationist Approach in the Global South

One approach to food insecurity, embodied by USAID and others working with them, is aligned with what those studying development call modernization theory. This approach argues that rural residents of underdeveloped countries need to modernize and participate more fully in the global economy to increase their ability to purchase food. USAID, for example, views the key to addressing food insecurity as increasing agricultural productivity. Their plan to increase food security contains six pints:

• Improving policy frameworks to catalyze economic growth
• Bolstering agricultural science and technology
• Developing domestic market and international trade opportunities to ensure rural farmers adequate returns
• Securing property rights and access to finance
• Enhancing human capital through education and improved health
• Protecting the vulnerable through conflict resolution and transparency in public institutions

Taken together, these strategies encourage nation-states to create an economic climate in which rural, food-insecure farmers can sell increased quantities of food, thus raising their incomes and achieving food security.

Organizations approaching food security through the lens of modernization theory argue that rural producers need increased access to foreign and domestic markets. To this end, such organizations work to increase product quality standards, develop infrastructure for transport, and increase access to market information. For example, USAID works with small coffee farmers to increase quality, improve business practices, promote value-added approaches, and encourage producers to diversify into niche markets such as gourmet fruits and vegetables or environmental services. In doing so, producers can increase their incomes and thus their food security.

Modernizationists working to address food security are often strong proponents of increasing access to technology among rural farmers in the global South. They tend to support what is commonly called the green revolution, in which agricultural technologies such as pesticides, irrigation projects, synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, and improved crop varieties were made available to farmers in the global South. Modernizationists claim that production increases enabled by the green revolution have helped India to avoid famine. Indeed, renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, has stated that lack of chemical fertilizers is one reason for massive rates of hunger in Africa. Sachs and other modernizationists also tend to support the introduction of genetically modified crops. This technology, they argue, can provide food-insecure farmers with improved crop and livestock varieties, increasing agricultural productivity and economic growth.

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