World Food Policy WFP Volume 4, No. 2, Spring 2018 | Page 6

World Food Policy
rapidly and on a broader scale with food consumed away from home as an
emerging pattern partly driven by e-commerce.
6. The major take-away message from the India case is that a purely national
perspective fails to capture root causes of food insecurity and therefore a
diversified, interstate approach is required.
7. Structural transformation of agriculture and rural areas is a key require-
ment for achieving complete food security. However structural transfor-
mation analysis must look beyond the classic agriculture-non-agricul-
ture-sector dichotomy and must much more take into account the food
industry complex and its interplay with advanced technologies especially
from the IT sector.
8. A major challenge in the near future is the emergence of internationally
farm size structures. The majority of farmers in both China and India are
still small scale farmers who increasingly must rely on non and off-farm
income sources to finance a decent livelihood standard. While eventually
competitive farm size structures will emerge in Asia it is hard to predict
how long this will take to realize. Current economic, institutional and po-
litical factors constrain that this will happen fast in both China and India
and likewise in many other Asian emerging market economies. What is
lacking is a innovative and inclusive rural development policy that com-
bines agricultural transformation with overall economic structural change.
9. Another unresolved issue that were highlighted in both the discussions
and in some of the papers is the nutrition challenge. There is no easy solu-
tion to the double burden of nutrition transitions with obesity and un-
dernutrition being observed even in the same rural household. As clearly
shown in the India case agricultural transformation per se does not solve
this problem What is needed instead is a re-thinking of agricultural policy
concepts that make nutrition an implicit component.
10. Finally, the rapid change in the preferences and the behavior of food con-
sumers in China and increasingly in India too, brings food safety to the top
of the agenda and makes it an inseparable component of a modern food
security concept. As larger and more complex production, processing and
marketing chains become dominant in the food systems of the future a
trustworthy food safety regulatory framework must be developed that is
capable of effectively monitoring the entire food chain and is capable to
avoid the food scandals that have been happening not only in China and
India but also in the developed world.
The papers that are subsequently presented in this this “double volume” can
be broadly organized into three groups. First, an overview of the global drivers
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