Food Self-Provisioning in Czechia: Beyond Coping Strategy of the Poor: A Response to Alber and Kohler’s ‘Informal Food Production in the Enlarged European Union’ (2008)

Food systems are of increasing interest in both research and policy communities. Surveys of post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) show high rates of food self-provisioning. These practices have been explained in terms of being ‘coping strategies of the poor’. Alber and Kohler’s ‘Informal Food Production in the Enlarged European Union’ (2008) offers a prominent account of this argument, supported by quantitative data. However, evidence from our case study of food self-provisioning in one CEE state–Czechia–contradicts their findings. Newly commissioned survey data, as well as a fresh look at the data they were working from, demonstrate that rather than being motivated by poverty, these widespread practices serve as a hobby and as a way of accessing ‘healthy food’. With food self-provisioning becoming an increasingly prominent subject in advanced industrial countries, in terms of both health and environmental policy, we propose that much greater care is taken in researching and interpreting the reasons for differences in food systems. Our findings are that environmentally sustainable and healthy self-provisioning in Czechia is motivated by a range of reasons, and practised by a significant proportion of the population across all social groups. This conclusion questions linear narratives of progress that figure ‘western’ practices as advanced or complete or automatically desirable, and contributes in a modest way to a decentring of narratives of progress.     

Fertility and union formation during crisis and societal consolidation in the Western Balkans

Fertility decline in central and eastern Europe (CEE) since the fall of the communist regimes has been driven by both stopping and postponement of childbearing: two processes that have been related to crisis and economic development, respectively. In the Western Balkans these economic and political contexts followed each other in the form of a biphasic transition. I examine whether this sequence triggered fertility responses like those observed elsewhere. Relying on three independent data sources, I cross-validate the levels of, and describe the trends in, union formation and fertility (by birth order) between 1980 and 2010. Results do not reveal widespread declines in fertility to lowest-low levels during the most acute period of crisis. The subsequent postponement of marriage and first birth was also limited, and the two-child family remains the norm. This relative resilience of childbearing patterns compared with other CEE countries is discussed with reference to the institutional context.     

The objectives of government policies on fertility control in Eastern Europe

Although demographers from the communist countries continue to maintain that overpopulation in the Malthusian sense Is possible only under capitalism, some East European demographers now concede that a form of overpopulation may, at times and under certain conditions, exist In a communist society. In this connection the ideological framework for an optimum population policy under communism has been developed, and demographers have been given the task of determining what the optimum population is and how it is to be attained. There has been considerable ferment on the Issue of fertility control in both the literature and action programmes of Poland, Chechoslovakia, and Hungary. The latter two countries have conducted surveys on family planning, including the use and effectiveness of contraceptives, and have established demographic journals.

All the communist countries of Eastern Europe except Albania and East Germany have relaxed laws restricting abortions and conducted campaigns for the spread of contraceptives. At the same time family allowances have been continued. These paradoxically divergent policies can be rationalized as attempts to sustain existing families while providing the basis for regulating future fertility to achieve an optimum population in relation to the resources of the respective countries.     

Do immigrants displace young native workers: The Austrian experience

This paper studies the effect of increased immigration in Austria on the unemployment risk of young natives. Austria experienced a dramatic rise in the share of alien workers as a result of the breakdown of the former communist regimes (especially from former Yugoslavia). We concentrate on unemployment entry of young male workers, who are supposed to compete most heavily with new immigrants. Our results indicate that the detrimental impact – if it exists at all – is only minor. This is irrespective of the analyzed proxy for competition: The share of foreign workers in an industry or in a region. Received: 7 March 1996/Accepted: 20 March 1998     

Feeding a growing world

Technology allows for the increased production of food to meet the demands of a rapidly growing population. However, in poor countries, technology may not be economically or environmentally affordable. The balance between food supply and population growth will depend upon government's ability to design and enforce policies and programs to deal with increased population, poverty, and environmental degradation. Approaches will be specific to a country's needs. In Bangladesh, food aid will be needed. In Zaire, political reform will be required. Many countries will have to shift from investments in war to social development. Three kinds of countries will experience difficulty in feeding their populations: 1) countries with little or no reserves of fertile land or water and insufficient funds for food imports; 2) countries that have sufficient reserves of land and water but suffer from government policy failures and neglect of agriculture; and countries with political instability and civil war, which invariably are linked with famine and drought. The future prospects will be a slow increase in dietary intake in most regions, fluctuations in food availability and prices, increased crop yields and land under cultivation, and slower expansion of agricultural lands due to environmental constraints. Pessimists have predicted increased environmental costs of food production due to soil erosion, pesticide contamination of soil and water, loss of species, and fertilizer run-off. Optimists have argued that new lands can be brought under cultivation and investments in agricultural research can help to increase food productivity. As Population Council vice president in the Research Division, John Bongaarts has reiterated that a positive outcome is more likely if population growth can be stopped.     

Malthus and the Philippines

Jose D. Drilon, Jr., president of Food Terminal, Inc., and a former undersecretary of the then Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources in the Philippines, attributes the widening gap between food supply and demand in developing countries to the high rate of population growth and to the inability of poor countries to produce more food. This situation, in which many countries are facing hunger, was predicted by Thomas Robert Malthus as early as the 16th century. The primary concern of Malthus was the problem of making the food supply keep pace with a constantly growing population. The question arises as to how reliable is Malthusian theory. According to Drilon, Malthus was correct in predicting that population would expand at a rate not previously imagined but that the other aspects of Malthusian theory might not hold true due to the intervention of human beings. For example, it is hoped that the imbalance between population growth and food production can be minimized in the future. In the Philippines there is good reason to be concerned about the validity of Malthusian theory. Although the country's growth rate has been reduced from 3.01% in 1970 to 2.6%, it is still quite high. However, the Philippines has actually been producing sufficient food to feed its population. To make the Philippines self-sufficient in rice, the government initiated the Masagana 99 program in May 1973. Technical and material resources from the public and private sectors were provided to aid rice producers. A nationwide information campaign was also launched to familiarize the farmers with the new methods of rice culture. Masagana 99 has been costly but effective. Since the launching of the program, rice production in the Philippines has been increasing at 7% a year. The government is now using the Masagana 99 formula to increase the production of other crops.     

Is low fertility a twenty-first-century demographic crisis?

Nearly half of the world's population in 2000 lived in countries with fertility rates at or below replacement level, and nearly all countries will reach low fertility levels in the next two decades. Concerns about low fertility, fertility that is well below replacement, are widespread. But there are both persistent rationales for having children and institutional adjustments that can make the widespread intentions for two children attainable, even in increasingly individualistic and egalitarian societies.     

Social Cohesion and the Labour Market: Societal Regimes of Civic Attitudes and Labour Market Regimes

The aim of this paper is to test the connections between the indicators used in the literature on social cohesion, which usually reflect ‘general’ values or behaviours, and indicators specific to a particular space, namely the labour market. A key question is the stability of the social cohesion’s indicators when moving from a societal level to the labour market. Based on data from the World Value Survey, and following a restrictive definition of social cohesion, a comparison is done, for European countries. Examination of the situation in the two spheres makes it possible to identify more or less homogeneous groups of countries and also to point to instabilities. ‘Regimes’ of social cohesion begin to emerge. As in most analyses, the Nordic countries (excluding Finland) have high scores in all the dimensions. Conversely, most of the new EU member states from the former Eastern bloc have low scores, particularly in the horizontal dimension of trust between individuals.     

Sex Differentials in Undernutrition: A Look at Survey Evidence

This note seeks indirect evidence regarding possible sex biases in food intake for adults and children, through large‐scale survey findings for anthropometric indicators. Among adults, excess female undernutrition is a serious problem in view of the large populations concerned (rural China, India), but data are still needed to assess the situation in many countries. Regarding preschool children, the anti‐female biases once noted for China, India, and other countries seem to have disappeared. Where differences exist, boys fare worse than girls (probably because girls, given a less than adequate food supply, tend to cope with it better than boys). Anti‐female discriminatory practices either are limited in magnitude or apply in groups that are too few or too small to be detectable in large populations.     

World population growth and the food supply]

The general trend in the last several hundred years has been that the speed of growth in the food supply exceeds the speed of the population growth. For the time being, 2 major problems still exist. The 1st problem is that food production is still influenced by natural conditions. For example, abnormal weather conditions may cause regional food shortages. The 2nd problem is the imbalance of food consumption by the world population. This phenomenon exists between different social classes as well as between developed and developing countries. According to statistics released by the World Bank, 1 billion suffer from malnutrition today and most of them are in developing countries. In developed countries, about half of their increase in the food supply is for feed grains, and those countries follow the policy of reducing farm land for the purpose of maintaing stabl e grain prices. Up to the present time, grain prices have been unstable, and this has become a rather heavy economic burden for numerous developing countries. Many developing countries are trying to increase grain production by increasing their arable land and promoting their cultivating techniques. However, these countries are facing the problems of finding and adequate water supply, fertilizer, and pesticides. In addition, a rapid population growth in these countries has offset their endeavors in agriculture. In recent years, these counties have realized the necessity of birth control. The world population growth rate has decreased from 2% to about 1.7% in 1981. Birth control and an increase in the food supply will bring new hope to the world's problems of overpopulation and food supply.     

A multilevel analysis of the effects of a reproductive health programme that encouraged informed choice of contraceptive method rather than use of officially preferred methods,China 2003–2005

Using data from the Food and Agricultural Organization and some other sources, it was estimated that rapid population growth in countries with an initial average calorie availability of below 2800 per head inhibited improvements in food production and availability per head during the 1980s and early 1990s. There were statistically significant negative effects of population growth on the growth in the production of noncereal food crops, milk, and meat, and in total food production. Because net food imports and aid shipments of cereals responded similarly, rather than acting as compensatory factors, the development in total calorie availability per head was least satisfactory in countries with the most rapid growth. A rapid increase in the number of adults of working age appeared to be no less disadvantageous than an increase in the number of children or elderly. Weaker effects were found when the entire 1970-95 period was considered. There were few indications that poverty, illiteracy, or land or water scarcity made it particularly difficult to cope with a growing population.     

Population distribution and economic development in Africa: The need for urbanization policies

Many countries in Africa are facing severe development problems because of high rates of population growth, stagnant or declining agricultural productivity, and increasing migration of the rural poor to large cities. Most demographic studies of Africa ignore problems arising from the spatial distribution of population and public allocation of investment. Strategic planning of the location of development investments in ways that will prevent or reduce excessive concentration of population and productive activities in large primary cities is becoming increasingly important for many African governments. In this article it is argued that the excessive growth of primary cities in predominantly rural countries can be detrimental to their economic recovery. Policies encouraging more widespread distribution of population in secondary cities and towns and policies promoting investment in physical infrastructure, marketing, small-scale manufacturing, and agroprocessing in secondary cities and towns can provide a stronger base for both rural and urban development in many African countries in the future.     

Food and population: beyond five billion

The developing countries, with about 3/4 of the world's population, account for less than 1/2 of the production of major food crops. The Third World's per capita food production of 260 kilograms in 1983 was only 1/3 of that in the developed countries. Yet China and India, the most populous countries in the world, have cut fertility rates and moved to food self-sufficiency. An illustration of the food/population dynamic is that although production of food staples in North Africa and the Middle East is projected to expand at about the same rate as that of Asia, about 2.9% annually, owing to a much more rapid rate of population increase, they will achieve only a 0.2% increase in output per person per year, compared with a 1.4% annual growth rate in Asia. In the longer term, higher dietary levels per capita for a world population double that of the present would imply at least a tripling of demand for dietary staples. But more intensive cultivation would place natural resources, many already degraded, under much greater stress. Balancing population, food, and resources for sustained survival is a continual process. The principle cause of hunger and malnutrition is poverty; it is more determinative of nutritional status than aggregate food production.     

Inequalities in Healthy Life Expectancy in Eastern Europe

Compared to the large body of research on mortality differentials between East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, little attention has been paid to how overall population health status differs between these two country groups. This article investigates disparities in population health, measured by healthy life expectancy (HLE) between ages 20 and 74, for 23 Eastern European countries in 2008. There are substantial disparities in partial HLE between East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, amounting to differences of 10 years on average for men and women. In addition, factors reflecting the malfunction of existing social structure are inversely associated with partial HLE. Accordingly, populations in countries where corruption, restriction of freedom, and violence are prevalent spend fewer years in good health.     

Unmarried cohabitation and union stability: Testing the role of diffusion using data from 16 European countries

Cohabitors and married people who cohabited before marriage have higher risks of union dissolution than people who married without prior cohabitation. However, these differences in union stability vary markedly between countries. We hypothesize that the impact of cohabitation on union stability depends on how far cohabitation has diffused within a society. We test this hypothesis with data from 16 European countries. The results support our hypothesis: former cohabitors run a higher risk of union dissolution than people who married without prior cohabitation only in societies in which cohabitation is a small minority or a large majority phenomenon.     

Single Motherhood and Child Mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Life Course Perspective

Single motherhood in sub-Saharan Africa has received surprisingly little attention, although it is widespread and has critical implications for children’s well-being. Using survival analysis techniques, we estimate the probability of becoming a single mother over women’s life course and investigate the relationship between single motherhood and child mortality in 11 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Although a mere 5 % of women in Ethiopia have a premarital birth, one in three women in Liberia will become mothers before first marriage. Compared with children whose parents were married, children born to never-married single mothers were significantly more likely to die before age 5 in six countries (odds ratios range from 1.36 in Nigeria to 2.61 in Zimbabwe). In addition, up to 50 % of women will become single mothers as a consequence of divorce or widowhood. In nine countries, having a formerly married mother was associated with a significantly higher risk of dying (odds ratios range from 1.29 in Zambia to 1.75 in Kenya) relative to having married parents. Children of divorced women typically had the poorest outcomes. These results highlight the vulnerability of children with single mothers and suggest that policies aimed at supporting single mothers could help to further reduce child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa.     

Social change,out-migration,and exit from farming in Nepal

Population and Environment - Though international out-migration is widespread, little evidence exists regarding the consequences for economic change in sending countries, particularly in the...     

Population, nutrition and agriculture

The human carrying capacity of the world or a country is considered as a function of food consumption per capita. A method of assessing carrying capacity is described, and it is shown that the world’s population currently exceeds the global carrying capacity, that the population of the less-developed countries (LDCs) exceeds their carrying capacity, and that this situation cannot be expected to change more than marginally in the period up to 2050. It is also shown that a major increase in the global consumption of nitrogen fertilizer will be necessary if world crop production per capita is to be maintained at the current inadequate level.     

Relationship Between Household Food Poverty and Vulnerability to Food Poverty: Evidence from Nigeria

Poverty and vulnerability to poverty are major challenges facing developing countries and have attracted the attention of development economists and policy analysts in recent years. This study examined the relationship between household food poverty and vulnerability to food poverty in Nigeria based on data from Nigeria Living Standard Survey (NLSS) (2004) obtained from the National Bureau of Statistics. A least-cost technique associated with the food-energy-intake approach was used to compute zone-specific food poverty lines based on the food baskets common to each geo-political zone; the Foster–Greer–Thorbecke (FGT) poverty index was used in computing food poverty incidence; the three-step feasible generalised least squares (3FGLS) procedure was used in estimating the magnitude of vulnerability to food poverty; cross tabulation and Pearson’s product moment correlation coefficient were utilised for the purpose of analysing the association between household food poverty and vulnerability to food poverty. The food poverty incidence was 50.23 % while the vulnerability to food poverty incidence was 61.68 % and the vulnerability to food poverty/food poverty ratio was 1.228. The food poor were more vulnerable to food poverty than the non food poor. There was significant positive correlation between food poverty incidence and vulnerability to food poverty incidence even though the correlation was not very strong. Thus, policies and programmes that will optimally reduce food poverty and vulnerability to food poverty should be adopted in Nigeria; these should be targeted more on the food poor. This is a major way to break the yoke of underdevelopment in Nigeria.     

World food resources and population: the narrowing margin

This bulletin examines the narrowing margin between global food production and population growth. Between 1950 and 1971, world grain production nearly doubled and per capita production increased 31%. During the 1970s, gains in output barely kept pace with population growth, consumption/person declined in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, food prices were volatile, and over 100 food deficit countries came to depend on the exportable surplus of North America, now the only major grain exporting region. The world fish catch levelled off in the early 1970s and beef production, still dependent mainly on grassland grazing, levelled off in the mid-1970s. With little new land left to plow, satisfying increased food demand now depends on sharp increases in yields on existing crop land. Worldwide, this effort is hampered by loss of topsoil and irrigated land, conversion of cropland to nonfarm uses, rising energy costs, inefficient agrarian structures, particularly in the Soviet Union, the falling yield response to chemical fertilizers in agriculturally advanced countries, and the emerging competition between food and agriculturally based energy crops. Green Revolution successes in some developing countries deomonstrate that, given the right inputs, 3rd world farmers can increase crop yields dramatically. Feeding the world's poor also requires more equitable income and food distribution, including a reduction in the proportion of grain and fish consumed indirectly as livestock products by the affluent. Most important in meeting food needs on a finite planet is braking population growth. The author concludes that every effort should be made to stabilize world production at abour 6 billion by 2020, rather than 10.5 billion by 2110, as is now projected by the UN.