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Sustainable Agriculture: The Food Chain Chapter j 24 505

consumption of cheap food with high energy content (sugar and alcohol
mostly) in the largest part of population, which have low wage levels; high-
value food (i.e., preprocessed foods like frozen food) for high-income peo-
ple; and a well-balanced healthy diet only for a few most fortunate people,
1
who are well educated and rich. In such situations there is a clear “health gap ”
among countries with different average per capita income level.
Food prices are part of the problem, making poor people able to buy only
unhealthy food, and allowing them to satiate hunger often with the sole
alternative of obesity due to the consumption of a higher energy content only
via food available at convenient price. The frightening obesity is definitely
coming back in countries deeply affected by the economic crisis (Lock et al.,
2010) wherein food choice is strongly driven by a lower available income with
respect to the past.
In such critical context, food security is a target yet to be reached, mostly in
those countries in which there is an unsatisfactory level of enforcing popu-
lation rights with respect to accessing resources, mainly land and food, like in
less developed areas of the world (i.e., land grabbing, grazing rights on
common land, access to public water resource; Freibauer et al., 2011).

ECONOMIC IMPLICATIONS
By tradition, sustainability in food sector has been referred in terms of yield
2
gap, and accordingly scarcity has been related to natural resources: soil water,
energy, phosphorous, and nitrogen. These are the basic producing factors
involved in food production. However, recent dynamics show new emerging
scarcities that stem from the development path of the modern society
(Freibauer et al., 2011)(Fig. 24.1).
Beside traditional scarcities, climate change sheds light on the future
availability of rain water for crops and progressive desertification of cultivated
land that is claimed by many competing uses [food production, bioenergy
crops, fodder, and urbanization; Beddington et al. (2011)] and therefore is
becoming scarce. Referring to natural resources involved in food production,
biodiversity is also becoming scarce. Intensive agriculture implies an
increasing biodiversity loss with respect to both animal and vegetable genetic
resources, dramatically reducing the opportunities for future plant and animal
breeding. The economic response mechanism typical of free markets is unable
to alleviate the scarcity effects of these resources solely by means of prices,
like it is usually done for private goods, showing increasing negative exter-
nalities that end up in the so-called “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin, 1968).

1. See Joffe and Robertson (2001) and Friel et al. (2008).
2. The difference between the actual productivity and the best level achievable using current
technologies available.