Global food security: the engineering challenges

Despite a prolonged decline since 2000 when over 900 million people around the world were chronically malnourished, 2016 saw a reversal, with 815 million being reported as malnourished compared to 777 million in the previous year (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2017a). The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has identified a number of underlying factors including political instability, droughts and flooding. This reversal marks a notable blow to the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 2) of ending hunger and malnutrition by 2030 and highlights the immense importance of efforts to enhance ‘Global Food Security’ (GFS).

According to the most widely used FAO definition ‘people are considered food secure when they have availability and adequate access at all times to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life’. Figure 1 illustrates the four ‘pillars’ of the food security, which could briefly be described as:

(i)	Availability: concentrates on the sufficient production and trade of food globally to ensure that it is, at least in principle, physically present for people to consume,
(ii)	Access: concerns with how income, markets and various other social factors influence food accessibility at an individual level,
(iii)	Utilisation: considers how feeding practices, food preparation, diversity of the diet and intra-household distribution of food can affect the nutritional status of individuals, and
(iv)	Stability: focuses on the likelihood of availability, access and utilisation being detrimentally impacted by periodic disruptions such as weather, political instability or conflicts.

Figure 1. The four pillars of global food and nutrition security as defined by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) (2017c).

An FAO panel of experts, meeting in September 2011, identified a comprehensive set of indicators designed to capture the key principles underpinning each pillar of food security (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2017b), detailing the nutritional markers for suitable availability of food, the infrastructural and societal markers for adequate access, the indicators of sanitation and health that underpin utilisation, and finally, the economic and political indicators for the stability of food supply.

Despite the obvious benefits to quality of life, national productivity and global development, there are several modern-day factors which seriously threaten the state of global food security. Not only is the world’s population growing and expected to surpass 9 billion people by 2050, thus increasing demand for food, but also a range of economic, environmental and social factors are increasing volatility and disruptions in food supply chains. Additionally, the world is increasingly constrained in what it can grow and where, due to the climate change related extreme weather and biodiversity loss as well as competition for land from other uses. This has come to be described as a ‘perfect storm’ by many (Ingram et al. 2013), and has led to the definition of 10 global challenges for the establishment of GFS by FAO in a report published in 2017 (Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations 2017d). These challenges are wide-ranging, some of which are of particular relevance from an engineering perspective including ensuring a sustainable natural resource base, addressing climate change and intensification of natural hazards, making food systems more efficient, inclusive and resilient, and building resilience to protracted crises, disasters and conflict. Clearly, addressing these challenges requires a multidisciplinary approach and some important areas of research such as sustainable intensification of agriculture processes, preservation of bio-diversity, and the enhancement of the nutritional balance and digestive process of food products, fall outside the scope of the IJSE. However, these also present a broad range of exciting sustainable engineering challenges, which include:

•	Novel resource-efficient food processing techniques which can be applied more locally, perhaps in less developed regions.
•	Manufacturing technologies, processes and strategies designed with the health, safety, quality and shelf-life extension of foods products, in particular within developing countries.
•	New forms of logistics and distribution to facilitate penetration of a wide range of foods into dense urban areas and/or infrastructure poor developing regions.
•	Modifications of food provision specifically tailored to consumer needs (for example, in terms of nutrition and portion size) as well as societal needs (e.g. recyclability and reusability of packaging materials).
•	Novel cleaning processes for both food ingredients and production systems, free from hazardous chemicals and substances.
•	Engineering solutions to improve the integrity and traceability of food supply chains with appropriate considerations for risk mitigation in increasingly volatile and complex operating environment.
•	Developing robust supply chain infrastructure designed to be resilience to crises, disasters and conflicts.

We encourage our potential authors to consider the specific requirements of GFS in their future publications, and welcome high-quality research submissions which explicitly address these sustainable engineering challenges.

An overview of publications in this issue

In this second issue of 2018, we present five papers all of which focus on the paramount importance of design considerations in sustainable engineering.

The first paper by Favi et al. explores the implementation of an eco-design methodology and the related software platform (G.EN.ESI – Green ENgineering dESIgn) along with its adoption by a manufacturer of cooker hoods. In the second paper, Bag et al. present a green purchasing framework by exploring the relationships between buyers and suppliers, unethical practices and green design for sustainability.

The third paper by Alemam et al. proposes a methodology to support concept selection and suggest potential areas for further eco-design improvements. A coffee maker is used to demonstrate the proposed methodology. In the fourth paper, Iemma et al. explore multi-objective optimizations including financial merit factors in the multidisciplinary conceptual design of a commercial aircraft with a specific focus on noise social cost.

Finally, in the last paper, Delogu et al. discuss the main barriers for modelling and integrating environmental performance in automotive concept design.

Shahin Rahimifard
Jamie Stone
Hana Trollman
[email protected]