World Food Policy Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 113

World Food Policy economic development can become more broad-based (Dorward 2009; 2013). While the movement to cities and factory and service sector jobs can mean a move away from a lifetime of drudgery as peasant farmers, this particular view of peasant farming has been criticized as too simplistic because it overlooks the multiple reasons that farmers have for being on their own lands working for themselves (van de Ploeg 2008). The movement of people out of agriculture and into factories and service jobs, referred to as “de-agrarianization”, can lead simultaneously to higher national incomes as well as an increase in urban poverty (Lipton 1984; Patel 2013). Davis (2006) has argued that the practice of urban in-migration is leading to a planet of slums, and all too often the shanties and other accommodation to house growing numbers of urban workers is taking place on lands which previously grew food. Peri-urban expansion may be accompanied by the need to import more basic food stuffs, which in turn requires the requisite household income to access. For those rural citizens who leave the land and who cannot find work in cities, or who can secure only the most precarious jobs, income, and food poverty follow (Martinez-Gomez, Aboites-Manrique, and Constance 2013). Their return to rural areas as landless peasants can also result in higher rates of rural poverty. Ministries of Agriculture concentrate on agricultural production; Ministries of Trade oversee food import and export policies; Ministries of Health focus on food safety and nutrition education; and Ministries of Social Security and Taxation oversee househol d income policy. More recently, Ministries of the Environment have become involved because of their responsibilities for environmental conditions which directly influence food production—such as water, soil, and conservation values. Fragmented efforts across government departments have been compounded over the last 20 years with increasing emphasis on government deregulation (Davey and Richards 2013). This is alongside the rising influence of bodies such as the World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund, pushing for food supplies to come under the rule of international agencies and treaties (McMichael, P. 2005). The influence of middle-class consumers over food supplies through activism regarding animal welfare, sustainability, and other ethical positions plays a paradoxical role in undermining government authority (Gibson et al. 2011). Lack of national regulatory oversight has fostered a global food system characterized by Kickbusch (2010, 25): 3.5 - Fragmented oversight of food and nutrition security at national and global levels • considerable environmental strain and contributing to global warming; • increasing chronic disease worldwide —endangering the sustainability of In many nations, food security is health systems; approached through the uncoordinated • the control of a small number of very efforts of numerous ministries: large and influential companies, which 112