John Connell - Food Security in Small Island States

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Food security is one of the great issues of our time with all the available evidence suggesting that in most parts of the world climate change is making the challenges of producing adequate food more difficult. At the same time, neoliberal policies related to trade and marketing are not always supportive of food sovereignty, with their effects, in many contexts, being to undermine protections of health, equity, and sustainability.

These changes have particularly affected small island developing states (SIDS) that have weaker economies, are less easily able to adapt to climate change, and where patterns of agriculture and fishing are already changing in response. This book shows how the problems of food security and food sovereignty are a function of distinctive interactions between economic, social, political, technological, and environmental processes. It shows how in so many SIDS food insecurity is not a problem of food production, or even one of food distribution, but a function of livelihood insecurity. Thus, considerable care has gone into thinking about the structures and circumstances that affect livelihoods, how changes might be best supported, and how these relate to wider processes of development.

This book emerges from a special issue of Regional Environmental Change in 2015; it has developed the issues that were raised in that initial volume, drawing in more chapters from other SIDS to broaden accounts of food security and ensure coverage of different ocean realms. The chapters explore a range of circumstances from small coral atolls in Micronesia to larger Caribbean states such as Trinidad and Tobago. Collectively they point to the many different contexts of food security, different responses to trade, social change, and technological innovations, and the need for new policies and practices to ensure more secure livelihoods in support of food security and food sovereignty.

We would like to thank all the authors that contributed to this volume, as well as the work of Arlette Saint Ville, Gordon M. Hickey, and Patsy Lewis on the 2015 special issue of Regional Environmental Change that was the genesis of this volume.

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their important contribution to the original manuscripts in this collection. We are also very grateful for the support and assistance provided by the Springer editorial team and for the work of Arlette Saint Ville, Gordon M. Hickey, and Patsy Lewis on the special issue of Regional Environmental Change that was the genesis of this volume. We hope that researchers and policy makers find the work presented in this book useful.