Famine and food security are at opposite ends of a spectrum. It is only in modem times that entire societies, as opposed to privileged members of those societies, have been able to escape from chronic hunger and the constant threat of famine. Many countries in the developing world, especially in Africa and South Asia, have not managed to achieve this objective. In these countries, understanding the factors that cause widespread hunger and vulnerability to famines, and the mechanisms available to alleviate their impact, remain important intellectual challenges.
However, the present study underlines that there is a different way to pose the question. Rather than asking how to cope with hunger and famine, the question might be how to escape from their threat altogether. The main premise of this essay is that an early escape from hunger is not primarily the result of private decisions in response to free-market forces. Improved food security stems directly from a set of government policies that integrate the food economy into a development strategy that seeks rapid economic growth with improved income distribution. With such policies, countries in East and Southeast Asia offer evidence that poor countries can escape from hunger in two decades or less, that is, in the space of a single generation.
To achieve and sustain food security through rapid economic growth, the Asian experience suggests that the agricultural sector must be linked through three elements to food security: poverty alleviation, stability of the food economy, and growth itself. The effectiveness of these links depends critically on the initial conditions at the start of the process of rapid growth. In particular, agriculture can contribute little to equity if it is based on a "bi-modal" distribution of production or to stability if it is concentrated on a single export crop subject to substantial price fluctuations. Even in these circumstances, however, agriculture can be a significant contributor to economic growth.
Furthermore, the lesson from East and Southeast Asia for achieving and maintaining food security indicates that a growth process stimulated by a dynamic rural economy leads to rapid poverty alleviation, which in the context of public action to stabilize food prices, ensures food security.
This approach might not work in other settings, for example, where the staple foodgrain is traded in more stable world markets, or where land holdings are highly skewed, or where technologies are not available to raise agricultural productivity. In searching for appropriate food security strategies in these other environments, however, it is important not to misread the successful experience of East and Southeast Asia. In particular, free trade in rice and the full and immediate transmission of international price signals to domestic producers, traders, and consumers were not an element of food security in any of the successful Asian societies. Free trade is appropriate for most goods and services but the historical lesson from the countries of East and Southeast Asia that have emerged from hunger is that free trade in basic foodgrains overly constrains the public actions needed for governments to intervene on behalf of food security. In different circumstances, free trade might well be a fast and efficient route to food security, but the role of governments in ensuring this security would be radically different than the role played by governments in Asia.
