Research trends on the main threats to food security in international relations scholarship

• Published date: 01 November 2023
• Author: Enrique Valverde López,Alfonso Sánchez
• Date: 01 November 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/wfp2.12065

RESEARCH NOTE

Research trends on the main threats to food

security in international relations scholarship

Enrique Valverde L

opez|Alfonso S

anchez

Departamento de Estudios

Internacionales Avda. De las

Universidades, Universidad Loyola

Andalucía, Seville, Spain

Correspondence

Alfonso S

anchez, Departamento de Estudios

Internacionales Avda. De las Universidades,

Universidad Loyola Andalucía, s/n Dos

Hermanas, Seville 41704, Spain.

Email: asanchezc@uloyola.es

Abstract

After a slow and steady decrease in global food insecu-

rity, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion

of Ukraine have undone much of these gains. This

intervention aims to shed light on whether academic

research on food security is currently focused on the

most food-insecure countries and whether equal atten-

tion has been devoted to the biggest threats to food

security: economic shocks, extreme weather, and

armed conflict. We find that only 37% of countries in a

state of crisis, emergency, or famine have been the

focus of published research in food security. Moreover,

our analysis shows that, when combined, 53% of all

academic publications addressed at least one of the key

drivers of food insecurity, yet possible biases and gaps

emerge when these results are disaggregated by each

specific driver of food insecurity.

KEYWORDS

bibliometric analysis, food security

1|INTRODUCTION

Food security has been at the top of the international agenda because the United Nations

(UN) enshrined it as a basic human right in its 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights

(UNGA, 1948). However, it took the photograph of a severely undernourished young girl being

chased by a vulture waiting for her to die of starvation to capture the world’s attention during

the 1993 famine in Sudan. Since then, serious international efforts have been made to eradicate

hunger from a planet that produces enough food to feed everyone in it. In 2000, such a goal was

DOI: 10.1002/wfp2.12065

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