Food and Nutrition Security Governance: Gaps, Opportunities, and Policy Recommendations: The Case of Lebanon

Abstract

Food and Nutrition Security Governance (FNSG) has been widely addressed by different political, social, economic, and security disciplines. Since FNSG is a strategic practice and involves farmers, land, and economic wellbeing and access to food by households; it requires a series of decisions that involve stakeholders such as the food producers, the consumers, and the government. The most weighted arguments in the literature are that food security should be seen as a human-threatening physical security issue, an access issue, and its governance is a main driver for the structural violence of hunger caused by the multi-institutional co-opts. FNSG today is a driver of the food system, and it can also be one of its vulnerabilities. Policies that drive the food system and are associated with governance vary from food subsidies, food fortification, food labelling, and social protection programs. This project had three goals: 1) to uncover the relationship between food security performance and the presence of an operational FNSG model; 2) to survey the models of FNSG in the Arab Countries, and 3) to propose a model of FNSG in Lebanon. An extensive literature review was compiled from various reliable and valid journals, from previous articles, and from international organizations reports. Data on the FNSG of the top ten performing countries based on the Global Food Security Index (GFSI) as well as on the majority of Arab countries for which information is available was extracted from various sources. It was found that the most efficient food security governance systems are found in countries with an official legislation for an authority responsible for FNSG while most of others do not. A theory of change was implemented to propose a novel and original FNSG architecture that would ameliorate the current status-quo issues in Lebanon. A policy design is envisaged in the last part of this article as a potential solution for the current ‘chaotic’ FNSG. The results and synthesis of the literature review and its corresponding secondary data show that the food security is mediated by the success factors of a novel FNSG architecture.