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EDITED BY GEORGE MERGOS
MARINA PAPANASTASSIOU

FOOD
SECURITY AND
SUSTAINABILITY
Investment and Financing
along Agro-Food Chains
Food Security and Sustainability
 George Mergos • Marina Papanastassiou
Editors

Food Security and

Sustainability
Investment and Financing along Agro-Food
Chains
Editors
George Mergos Marina Papanastassiou
University of Athens Middlesex University Business School
Athens, Greece Hendon, United Kingdom

ISBN 978-3-319-40789-0 ISBN 978-3-319-40790-6 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40790-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956469

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and the Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made.

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Preface

The relevance of this volume is very timely. With evidence on climate

change accumulating, the issue of feeding 9.5 billion people in 2050
climbs high up in the international agenda. There is little doubt that
global warming represents for mankind the huge challenge of making
development sustainable. Hence, despite current efforts, these two issues,
food security and sustainability, remain unsettled. It is not just that
the world needs to produce more food to accommodate rapidly rising
demand due to fast-growing populations and incomes, but food systems
are also under severe stress due to climate change, there is a diet shift to
animal products and resource degradation.
After the food crisis of the 1970s, the downward trend in food com-
modity prices in the 1980s and the 1990s led to complacency. The year
2002 represents, though, a turning point with a food price trend reversal
and increased food price volatility initiating renewed interest on food
security and sustainability. However, this time the global terrain is dif-
ferent. Globalization has elevated a large part of the global population
to affluence, changing consumption, production and trade patterns, and
significantly affecting population well-being everywhere.
Clearly this challenge needs to be met on all levels of the political sys-
tem, that is, institutions of supra-national governance, national govern-
ments and sub-national actors. In addition, it requires not only strong
effort but also innovative governance practices. At the international level
v
vi Preface

there is strong effort in this direction, and achieving food security is the
second of the UN Sustainable Development Goals with the specific tar-
get to solve the problem of hunger by 2030. However, the issue has not
received similar attention at national, sub-national or even at household
levels due to its complexity and the difficulties encountered in policy
analysis and design.
Methodologically, food security has been analysed, up to very recently,
using traditional food-supply demand balances at global, national and
household level. The objective was to address issues of chronic or transi-
tory food insecurity, purchasing power, financing of food imports, buffer
stocks and commodity price volatility. However, over the next three–four
decades the problem of food insecurity gets increasingly complex, because
it should be considered within the context of climate change and resource
constraints, at a time of an accelerating economic and social transforma-
tion due to globalization. Thus, the nexus of food security, sustainability
and globalization establishes a new perspective in the very old issue of
food security. This new perspective should take into account compli-
cated Global Value Chains, responsible investment, sustainability issues
and recent advances in consumer behaviour. In addition, there are other
important issues that should also be considered, such as the efficiency of
distribution chains in reaching households in need, the impact of micro-
finance for generating purchasing power, the importance of price and
income volatility, risk mitigation policies, as well as the importance of
GMOs for global supply–demand balances. This new perspective gives
a new direction in the research agenda on food security, globalization
and sustainability. Hence, this is a timely volume because food security
has been designated as a key priority for sustainable development and as
such has been acknowledged by all major stakeholders responsible for
the future of global economy and human welfare. In the light of this, the
volume includes contributions of researchers from major international
organizations, national research institutions, universities and the private
sector.
The volume is by necessity eclectic. It aims to touch upon only a few
of the dimensions of food security. The volume begins with two chapters
on the shifting market environment and green growth strategies. Then it
proceeds to discuss issues of Global Value Chains in the agro-food system,
 Preface vii

investment, finance and risk. The second part of the book presents food-
security-related policies in a number of case studies drawn mainly from
the Mediterranean area.
When it comes to summarizing the discussion assembled in this vol-
ume, the message is mixed. Although food security and sustainability
are receiving increased attention and the commitment to improve food
security is widespread, the evidence on actual policy making is scarce. At
the core is the lack in understanding the complexity of the issues and the
need for interdisciplinary analysis. Food security and sustainability are at
the crossroads of three areas: science, economics and governance. Hence,
the identification of evidence-based policy measures would require the
collaboration of researchers in the three areas. This will be the main chal-
lenge for future research in the domain of policy design for food security
and sustainability.

Athens George Mergos

London Marina Papanastassiou
 Acknowledgements

This book stems from the inaugural workshop of the Mediterranean

Center for Food Security and Sustainable Growth (MED-SEC) that was
established in early 2015 as an interdisciplinary network of researchers
engaged in research, education and policy making in the area of Food
Security, Development and Sustainable Growth. The Workshop titled
“Investment and Financing along the Agro-food Value Chain for Food
Security and Sustainability” was convened in Athens, Greece, in May
2015. The high-quality contributions presented at the workshop by lead-
ing experts from academia, industry and international organizations pro-
vided state-of-the-art knowledge on the challenges food security poses to
the world.
The location of the Workshop was ideal, as Greece is located at the
crossroads of South East Europe, Eastern Mediterranean and the wider
MENA region which faces the impact of food insecurity. Countries in
the region experience limited and fragile natural resources—in particular,
land and water—and acute vulnerability to climate change. In addition,
the unstable political environment, conflicts that tantalize the region,
imposes further pressure on food prices and on available land for cultiva-
tion among other factors
This volume includes papers presented at the Workshop, as well as
papers by other prominent international experts who kindly responded
to the editors’ invitation to join and support this project. As a result,
ix
x Acknowledgements

this edited volume reflects the multidisciplinary approach adopted in the

Workshop as the only way to achieve an in-depth understanding of the
multifaceted nature of food security.
We would like to thank our sponsors and supporters for their gen-
erous contribution towards the realization of the Workshop and finally
of this volume. Our venue sponsor was excelixi Center of Sustainable
Entrepreneurship of the Bank of Piraeus Group, Greece. The Center pro-
vided us with excellent venue facilities and logistical support, and we are
thankful to them. Also, we have received support in the realization of the
Workshop from the Bank of Greece; the Middlesex University, UK; the
University of Athens, Greece; and our graphic designer partner, Impressme
Communications. We are grateful to our sponsors and our supporters for
their generous and unconditional contribution to the accomplishment of
this Workshop and the realization of this volume.
Editing the work of others is always easier than critically reviewing
one’s own output. Hence, for including our own chapter on the link
between GVCs, MNEs and food security, we turned to Hafiz Mirza of
UNCTAD for review. We are thankful to him for his penetrating com-
ments and suggestions.
Finally, we would like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude
to Maddie Holder and the staff of Palgrave Macmillan for their hard
work in getting this volume to press.
April 2016

University of Athens George Mergos

Athens, Greece
Middlesex University Business School Marina Papanastassiou
London, UK
 Contents

1 Food Security and Sustainability: Globalisation,

Investment and Financing 1
George Mergos and Marina Papanastassiou
Introduction and Overview 1
Food Security and Sustainability: Renewed Interest
on a Long-Standing Issue 2
Current Developments and Future Challenges 8
Definition, Measurement and Analysis of Food Security 12
Focus and Structure of the Book 18
Structure of the Book 21
Concluding Remarks 29

2 The Food Security Debate in a Shifting Market Environment 35

Tassos Haniotis
Introduction 35
Assessing the Main Drivers of Market Uncertainties 37
On the Causality of Commodity Price Movements 47
Relevance for the Policy Debate 50

xi
xii Contents

3 Green Growth Strategies in Agriculture

in OECD Countries 55
Wilfrid Legg
Introduction 55
Background 56
Green Growth Strategy 58
Sustainable Intensification 62
Policies 63
Which Types of Policies Have OECD Countries
Been Implementing? 65
From Strategy to Action 67

4 The Dominant Presence of MNES in Agro-Food GVCs:

Implications for the Developing Countries 71
Rajneesh Narula and M. Shakil Wahed
Introduction 71
Key Concepts of Global Value Chains (GVCS) 74
Overview of Agro-Food GVCS 75
Growing Significance of Differentiation
in Agro-Food GVCs 76
Limitations of the Developing Countries along
the Agro-Food GVCS 77
The Problems of Engaging with Agro-Food MNES 78
Modes of Governance and Engagement Between
Domestic Firms and MNEs 80
Challenges for Developing Countries 82
Conclusion 85

5 Global Value Chains, Multinational Corporations

and Food Security: Essential Theoretical
and Methodological Challenges for a Sustainable
Policy Agenda 89
Marina Papanastassiou and George Mergos
Introduction 89
Global Value Chains and MNC Subsidiaries 91
 Contents xiii

Food Security and MNC-Led Global Value Chains 94

Conclusion 96

6 Financial Needs and Tools for Agricultural Development

and Transformation Pertinent to Low-Income
and Low–Middle-Income Countries 101
Alexandros Sarris
Introduction 101
Agricultural Transformation and Development 103
How Does Agriculture Grow? 106
Financial Flows into Agricultural Development 108
Rural Finance and Agricultural Development 110
Recent Innovations in Rural Finance 115
Conclusion 117

7 MicroFinancial Services and Risk Management

for Food Security: A Vulnerable Household Perspective 121
Jyoti Navare
Introduction 121
Social Exclusion, Vulnerability and Food Security 122
Vulnerable Groups and Food Security and Risks 123
The Notion of the Vulnerable Householder 125
Economic Instruments 127
Food Security, Intra-Householder Processes
and Access to Credit 128
Financial Services and Consumption Smoothing 130
Some Workable Solutions for the Vulnerable Householder 131
Conclusion 132

8 Innovative Agri-Food Value Chain Financing

in Greece 139
Ioannis E. Chaniotakis
Introduction 139
Agricultural Credit, Value Chain Finance
and Contract Farming 141
xiv Contents

The Context of Greek Agriculture 145

The Agri-Food Sector and the Greek Economy 145
The “Contract Farming Program” (CFP) 150
The Experience of the CFP and Lessons
for Other Countries 155

9 Extreme Volatility in Agricultural Commodity Markets

and Implications for Food Security 161
Athanasios Triantafyllou, George Dotsis, and Alexandros Sarris
Introduction 161
How to Identify Extreme Returns 163
Risk Management Applications 167
Conclusions 172

10 Can MENA Reach the Sustainable Development Goals?

An Overview of Opportunities and Challenges for Food
and Nutrition Security 175
Nadim Khouri, Clemens Breisinger, and Hagar Eldidi
Introduction 175
Continuing Conflict Undermines Advances 177
Overcoming Regional Data Availability and Access Challenges 178
Prioritizing Food and Nutrition Security SDGs 181
Major Food Policy Developments in 2015 186
Conclusions and Outlook for 2016 188

11 Food Security and Vocational Education and Training:

Exploring the Links in the Egyptian Case 193
Salma Soliman
Introduction 193
The Problem of Food Security in Egypt 194
Social and Economic Implications of Food Import Policies 197
Food Security and Education 199
The Relationship Between Food Security and VET 201
Challenges to VET Development 202
Conclusion 204
 Contents xv

12 Food Security, Competitiveness and Trade: The Case

of Tunisian Agriculture 209
Ibtissem Taghouti, Mohamed Elloumi, Victor Martinez-Gomez,
and José María García Álvarez-Coque
Introduction 209
Agri-Food Sector, Trade and DCFTA in Tunisia 211
Methodology: Measuring the Competitiveness
of Tunisian Agri-Food Products 218
Results and Discussion 220
Conclusions 224

13 Food Security in Mongolia: A System

Innovation Perspective 229
Jae-Hwan Park, Jee-Yeon Choi, Tae-Hyung Kim,
and Steve Evans
Introduction 229
Food Security in Mongolia 232
Mongolian System Innovation of Food Security 236
Recommendations 238

14 Household Behavior on Food Security During

an Economic Crisis 243
Irene Kamenidou, Konstantinos Rigas and,
Constantinos-Vasilios, Priporas
Introduction 243
Food Security: The Concept 245
Economic Crisis and Households: Greece in the Context
of the Economic Crisis 246
Methodology 247
Results 248
Segmentation Analysis 251
Conclusions and Implications 255

Index 263
 Notes on Editors and Contributors

Editors
George Mergos is Professor of Economics, University of Athens, Greece, and
founding member of the Mediterranean Center for Food Security and
Sustainable Growth (MED-SEC). He has written extensively on issues of devel-
opment micro-economics, agricultural development and public policy in refer-
eed journals and books. His research interests focus on applied economics, food
security, public policy and sustainable development. He has previously worked
for the World Bank and consulted widely for FAO and the European
Commission. He has a PhD in applied economics from Stanford University,
USA, and MSc in agricultural economics from Oxford University, UK.
Marina Papanastassiou is Professor of International Business at Middlesex
University Business School, UK. She is a fellow of the European International
Business Academy, and founding member and executive director of the
Mediterranean Center for Food Security and Sustainable Growth (MED-SEC).
She has written extensively on the topic of multinational enterprises in interna-
tional refereed journals and books. She has her PhD in international business from
the University of Reading, UK. Her research interests focus in the areas of innova-
tion, R&D and growth strategies of multinational corporations, FDI and food
security, and foreign investment by large food and beverage multinationals.

xvii
xviii Notes on Editors and Contributors

Contributors
José María García Álvarez-Coque is Professor of Agricultural Economics,
Universitat Politècnica de València-UPV. He is currently chairing the Research
Group on International Economics and Development, a research unit dealing
with international agricultural issues. Between 2001 and 2007, he was chairing
the Spanish Association of Agricultural Economists.
Clemens Breisinger is senior research fellow and country programme leader
for Egypt, Development Strategy and Governance Division, International Food
Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). His research covers a broad range of issues
related to the roles of agriculture and mineral resources for economic develop-
ment, building resilience to crises and climate change, and designing policies for
improving food and nutrition security. He received his PhD in agricultural eco-
nomics from the University of Hohenheim.
Ioannis Chaniotakis is Director of Agricultural Sector Operations and
Development of Piraeus Bank, Greece. He is an agricultural banking profes-
sional with over 20 years of experience. He has a diverse experience in all aspects
of financing agricultural operations and leading the bank’s Contract Farming
Financing activities. He has a BSc and an MSc in agricultural economics and a
PhD in marketing. He has taught marketing at the University of the Aegean.
His research interest is in agricultural credit and finance, and his research papers
have been published in several academic journals.
Jee-Yeon Choi is a PhD student at Engineering Department in University of
Cambridge. She also belongs to EPSRC Centre for Industrial Sustainability.
With extensive experience as a designer in industry, Jee-Yeon researches on
developing an integrated learning system for food security and creating a design
process of knowledge management in sustainability.
George Dotsis is Assistant Professor of Finance, Department of Economics,
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. He holds a BSc in eco-
nomics, Athens University of Economics and Business; MSc in Mathematical
Finance, Cass Business School; and PhD in Finance, Athens University of
Economics and Business. During 2006–2011 he was a lecturer and senior lec-
turer at Essex Business School, University of Essex. His research interests are in
asset pricing, commodities, derivatives valuation and financial econometrics. His
works have appeared in the Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Empirical
Finance, Journal of Futures Markets and Journal of Agricultural Economics.
 Notes on Editors and Contributors xix

Hagar ElDidi is senior research assistant, Development Strategy and

Governance Division, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)—
Egypt. She holds a BA in economics from the American University in Cairo and
an MSc in interdisciplinary studies in Sustainability, with a specialization
in ecological economics, from the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Her research interests include equitable and sustainable communal gov-
ernance of natural resources, environmental justice, rural development
and food security for vulnerable communities.
Mohamed Elloumi is Professor of Agricultural Economics, National Institute
of Agronomic Research of Tunisia (INRAT), specialized in agricultural policies,
rural development and management of natural resources. He is working on mul-
tiple national and international projects. He coordinates and edited several
books on related issues in the Mediterranean area.
Steve Evans is a professor at the University of Cambridge. Steve Evans is direc-
tor of the national EPSRC Centre for Industrial Sustainability, helping industry
bring ambitious environmental sustainability goals into practice. He was
previously engineering systems manager at Martin-Baker Engineering.
Steve is a co-founder of multiple start-ups and has been Specialist Advisor
to the House of Lords. His research seeks a deep understanding of how
industry develops solutions that move us towards a sustainable future.
Tassos Haniotis is Director—Economic Analysis, Perspectives and Evaluations;
Communication—in the DG for Agriculture and Rural Development of the
European Commission. He also held posts as Acting Director for Direct
Payments, as Head of Unit in Agricultural Policy Analysis and Perspectives and
in Agricultural Trade Policy Analysis, as Deputy Head of Cabinet of former
European Commissioner for Agriculture Franz Fischler, and as Agricultural
Counsellor in the European Commission’s Delegation in the USA. He holds
PhD and MS degrees in agricultural economics, University of Georgia, USA, and
BA in economics, Athens University of Economics and Business.
Irene Kamenidou is Professor of Marketing and Dean of the Business School at
Eastern Macedonia and Thrace Institute of Technology (EMaTTech), Greece.
She is also affiliated with the Hellenic Open University. She holds a PhD in food
marketing, and has more than 10 years of working experience in the public and
private sector on agricultural and food marketing. Her works have been part of
various international academic journals and conferences. She is co-editor of the
xx Notes on Editors and Contributors

Journal of Business and Economic Sciences Applied Research. Her research interests
focus on agricultural and food marketing, retailing, health and social marketing.
Nadim Khouri is currently an independent researcher supporting the Global
Agricultural and Food Security Program. Previously, he held operational and
senior positions at the UN-ESCWA, IFAD and the World Bank. He has a PhD
in agriculture and is devoted to the exchange of evidence-based knowl-
edge on food and nutrition security. He also chairs the Arab Spatial Blog
run by the IFPRI-Egypt.
Tae-Hyung Kim has been working at the United Nations Economic and Social
Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP) since February 2007, as an
Economic Affairs Officer. During his tenure with ESCAP, he worked at
the Environment and Development Division (EDD) of UN ESCAP for
2007–2013, focusing on development issues such as sustainable resource man-
agement, disaster risk management, urban infrastructure development and
urban planning. Since May 2013, he moved to the ICT and Disaster Risk
Reduction Division (IDD) of UN ESCAP, and has been implementing develop-
ment programmes for developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region, focusing
on disaster risk management with geospatial information systems.
Wilfrid Legg is an economist, graduate of University College London, Leicester
and Reading Universities. From 1981 to 2011 he worked on agricultural and
agri-environmental policies in the OECD in Paris and from 1992 as Head of the
Agricultural Policies and Environment Division. Currently, he is a consultant
and advisor on agri-environmental policy issues and sustainable agriculture, and
is project team leader for a UN Committee on World Food Security report on
sustainable livestock for food security and nutrition. He was president of the
Agricultural Economics Society in 2003–2004 and has been its secretary since
2006. He a co-editor of EuroChoices, the outreach journal of the AES and
European Association of Agricultural Economists.
Victor Martinez-Gomez is Senior Lecturer in Agricultural Economics at the
Universitat Politècnica de València-UPV. His research focuses on the linkages
between trade and agricultural policies, with a number of journal papers and
book chapters written on this field. He is member of the Spanish and the
European Association of Agricultural Economists.
Rajneesh Narula is the John H. Dunning Chair of International Business
Regulation at the Henley Business School, University of Reading, UK. His
research and consulting have focused on the role of multinational firms in
 Notes on Editors and Contributors xxi

development, innovation and industrial policy, R&D alliances and outsourcing.

His articles and chapters have appeared in numerous leading journals and books,
and he regularly consults for the European Commission, UNIDO, UNCTAD
and the OECD, and a variety of other international organizations. He holds
honorary appointments at UNU-MERIT, Norwegian School of Business and
Oxford University.
Jyoti Navare is Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Business School,
Middlesex University, UK. She holds a PhD in risk management from the
University of Southampton. She has been involved as a risk underwriter in inter-
national financial services. Her research interests are in risk management, innova-
tion, sustainability, business modelling, economics of corporate social
responsibility and responsible finance, consumer and organizational behaviour
and professional development. She has written journal articles, books and chap-
ters in insurance and financial services risk.
Jae-Hwan Park is a lecturer at Middlesex University Business School and is an
associate of Mediterranean Center for Food Security and Sustainable Growth.
Before joining Middlesex University London, Jae-Hwan was a lead researcher at
the Centre for Industrial Sustainability in the University of Cambridge. At
Cambridge, Jae-Hwan has led various UN-funded research projects as a main
researcher, in particular focusing on industry sustainability in developing coun-
tries. With UN ESCAP, he has conducted research projects regarding Ulaanbaatar’s
urban development in terms of energy and water. Also, with UNIDO, his col-
leagues and Jae-Hwan developed a new integrated methodology for measuring
economic, environmental and social aspects of manufacturing industry in the
ASEAN regions: Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
Jae-Hwan’s main research agenda includes food security, a learning system for
sustainability and product/service systems in the context of knowledge
co-ordination.
Constantinos-Vasilios Priporas is Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Middlesex
University Business School, UK. His research interests include consumer behav-
iour and strategic marketing with main emphasis on tourism, food and retailing.
His works have been part of several international academic journals and confer-
ences. In addition, he co-edited a book. He is a member of several professional
bodies and he is editorial board member of the Journal of Customer Behaviour
and has acted as a guest editor, reviewer and track chair in academic journals and
conferences.
xxii Notes on Editors and Contributors

Konstantinos Rigas is an undergraduate student of business administration at

the Eastern Macedonia and Thrace Institute of Technology (EMaTTech) in his
senior year. Characterized by his mobility, has participated three times in interna-
tional programmes for intensive courses in and working experience through
ERASMUS+ programmes. He has presented papers in conferences and seminars,
and multiple times was a speaker for presentations regarding mobility and Mov’in
Europe, as an Erasmus Student Network (ESN) Ambassador.
Alexandros Sarris is Professor of Development and International Trade,
Department of Economics, University of Athens, Greece. He holds a PhD in
economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. He has been
Director of the Trade and Markets Division, of the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organization, and has taught at the University of California at
Berkeley, USA, and the University of Auvergne in France. He has authored more
than 15 books and monographs, and more than 70 journal and book articles, and
has advised many international organizations over 20 countries.
Salma Soliman is Lecturer in International Management, Middlesex University
Business School, UK. Her research interests include public policy and human
capital development with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa
region. Before joining Middlesex University, Soliman worked in manage-
ment consultancy across different sectors including education.
Ibtissem Taghouti is a junior researcher at the National Research Institute of
Rural Engineering, Water and Forests (INRGREF). She is working on different
issues in relation with international trade of agro-food products, rural develop-
ment and agricultural policies. She has participated in various international
research projects and networks in the Mediterranean countries.
Athanasios Triantafyllou is a consultant on risk management with Ernst & Young.
He has worked on CGE models at the E3MLab (ICCS-NTUA). He holds a BSc in
mathematics from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, an MSc in
accounting and finance from the Athens University of Economics and Business, and
an MPhil in economics from the University of Athens, and he is a PhD candidate in
economics, University of Athens. His research interests are on food price volatility,
agricultural trade and food security, agricultural risk management and dynamic
interactions between macroeconomic policy and financial markets.
M. Shakil Wahed is a graduate student at the Henley Business School,
University of Reading, UK.
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Three indicators of world food demand (1966 = 100) 6

Fig. 1.2 Trends in Food Prices (2002–2004 = 100) 9
Fig. 1.3 Trends in Nominal Prices of Food Commodities
(2002–2004 = 100) 9
Fig. 2.1 Trends in real commodity prices 36
Fig. 2.2 Trends in monthly commodity prices (nominal) 38
Fig. 2.3 GDP growth—major economies 39
Fig. 2.4 GDP growth—BRICs 40
Fig. 2.5 Maize price expressed in local currency (nominal) 41
Fig. 2.6 Wheat stock-to-use ratio and wheat price 42
Fig. 2.7 Maize stock-to-use ratio and maize price 42
Fig. 2.8 Changes in cereal demand 2005–14 43
Fig. 2.9 World grain consumption patterns 44
Fig. 2.10 World meat consumption patterns 44
Fig. 2.11 World milk consumption patterns 45
Fig. 2.12 World vegetable oil consumption patterns 45
Fig. 2.13 The diverging paths of energy prices 46
Fig. 2.14 The diverging paths of gas prices 47
Fig. 3.1 GHG emissions, GDP, and productivity for agriculture
in the OECD area 61
Fig. 3.2 Nutrient balance intensity and agricultural production,
OECD area, 1990–2009 61
Fig. 3.3 “Green growth” compared to “business as usual” 64

xxiii
xxiv List of Figures

Fig. 3.4 Evolution of producer support in OECD countries

by potential environmental impact 67
Fig. 4.1 The primary actors within agro-food GVCs 76
Fig. 4.2 Linking Host Countries to Agro-Food GVCs 81
Fig. 10.1 Refugees hosted by and originating from Arab countries 176
Fig. 10.2 Child malnutrition by governorate 180
Fig. 10.3 National-level food security 182
Fig. 10.4 Percentage of women in Jordan with no education
(Governorate 2012) 183
Fig. 10.5 Regional violent conflicts and food insecurity 184
Fig. 10.6 Damaged buildings and food insecurity
(selected countries struck by war) 185
Fig. 10.7 Latest available data on child stunting in Arab countries 186
Fig. 12.1 Agriculture value added share in Tunisia’s GDP (%)
(1980–2014) 210
Fig. 12.2 Evolution of Tunisian’s Agri-food imports
and exports (1993–2015) 211
Fig. 12.3 Evolution of Tunisia’s agri-food imports
and exports from the EU (2001–2014) 212
 List of Tables

Table 2.1 Cumulative commodity price changes during specific periods 37

Table 3.1 Green growth toolkit for food and agriculture 66
Table 8.1 Greek versus EU-28 Agriculture’s fundamentals 146
Table 9.1 Descriptive statistics of daily and monthly returns
of soya, maize and wheat 164
Table 9.2 Estimates of power law exponents using soya, maize
and wheat daily returns 166
Table 9.3 Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall of soya, maize
and wheat daily returns and 1 % and 0.1 % probability levels 168
Table 9.4 Probit regressions forecasting 1- and 2-sigma price spikes
in the maize, wheat and soybeans market 170
Table 12.1 Tunisian Trade balance 2011–2015 210
Table 12.2 Structure of agri-food exports (%) 2009–2014 211
Table 12.3 Structure of agri-food imports (%) 2009–2013 212
Table 12.4 Nominal Protection Coefficient for Producers—Tunisia 215
Table 12.5 RCA index of the Tunisian agri-food products
with the EU and UMA (%) 219
Table 14.1 Underlying motives for food security actions taken
by households (%) 248
Table 14.2 Factors derived based on deeper motives
for food security actions 249
Table 14.3 Segmentation based on underlined motives regarding
actions of food security 250

xxv
 1
Food Security and Sustainability:
Globalisation, Investment and Financing
George Mergos and Marina Papanastassiou

Introduction and Overview

The world has ample food, but a billion of people suffer food and nutrition
insecurity (von Brown 2014). At the same time, food systems are under
severe stress due to climate change, population growth, a shift in diets
and continuous resource degradation (Godfray et al. 2010; Nelson et al.
2010). Food security has been a long-standing issue, but after a period
of complacency in the 1980s and the 1990s, it has recently attracted
renewed interest due to food price crises and high food price volatil-
ity, forcing governments to consider food security as a stated strategic

G. Mergos ()
Department of Economics, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens,
Athens, 105 59, Greece
e-mail: g.mergos@med-sec.org
M. Papanastassiou ()
Department of International Management and Innovation, Middlesex
University Business School, London, NW4 4BT, UK
e-mail: m.papanastasiou@mdx.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2017 1

G. Mergos, M. Papanastassiou (eds.), Food Security and Sustainability,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40790-6_1
2 G. Mergos and M. Papanastassiou

objective. Problems of long-term food supply and chronic food insecurity

are caused by factors that affect long-term food demand and supply, as
well as by trade prospects in the horizon of 2050. But, food insecurity
results, also, from lack of purchasing power, volatility in international
food prices, food supplies and incomes, at national or at household level,
inter alia. The link between food insecurity and poverty necessitates a
strong research effort on poverty alleviation. Finally, public policy design
to address chronic or transitory food insecurity at national, regional or
household level is part of the research agenda (FAO 2014).
On the other hand, globalisation has brought sweeping changes in the
global economy and has affected the operation of food supply chains that
play a major role in determining food security at the country level. In
addition, huge inefficiencies of the food supply chain and significant food
loss and waste have a strong negative impact on food availability, pro-
ductivity and the environment. The emergence of Global Value Chains
(GVCs) dominating international investment and commodity trade rep-
resents a paradigm shift in policy design for food security. Also alternative
conduits of mobilising the private sector in linking the millions of small
stakeholders (small farmers, traders, processors) to international markets
through more inclusive value chains need to be explored as to results and
impact. In this context, this book explores how recent developments link a
number of food security issues with recent trends in international agricul-
tural trade and globalisation of agricultural production and manufactur-
ing, the mobilisation of small stakeholders through innovative financing
mechanisms, the green growth strategies that are promoted widely and
the importance of risk. Then, these issues are examined in the context of a
number of case studies mainly from the Mediterranean region.

Food Security and Sustainability: Renewed

Interest on a Long-Standing Issue
Thomas Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) described
a forthcoming population catastrophe where he predicted a forced return
to subsistence once population growth outpaced growth of food produc-
tion. The accelerated population growth rate in the twentieth century, in
particular population growth in the developing countries since the 1950s,
 1 Food Security and Sustainability... 3

renewed Malthusian fears expressed by the Neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich.

Ehrlich, a biologist, in his book The Population Bomb (1968), a widely
read publication that sold several million copies worldwide, argued that
in the near future developed countries would be required to undertake
some type of food rationing because starvation will be the result of over-
population in developing countries. In the extreme case, he argued, the
lack of food security in developing countries would be the trigger point
to serious socio-economic and political developments worldwide.
The wide acceptance of these ideas led to the establishment, in 1968, of
the The Club of Rome and the publication of the book The Limits to Growth
(Meadows et al. 1972). It was argued that if present growth trends continue,
and if associated industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource
depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be
reached sometime in the next 100 years with the most probable result being
the sudden and uncontrollable decline in population and industrial capacity.
Malthusian ideas, however, have not gone unchallenged. Ester Boserup,
a sociologist studying pre-industrial societies in Indonesia, wrote in 1965
The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change
under Population Pressure in which she puts Malthus on his head, claiming
that population growth is good for the society as it fosters technical change
and innovation. She claimed that people develop the required resources of
knowledge and technology to increase food supply as necessary. She agrees
that the environment poses limits that restrict population, but these limits
can be changed using innovation and technological change, with population
growth being the trigger for innovation to allow food supply to increase.
Further, Julian Simon, an economist, published two books challenging
Ehrlich further stimulating the population debate: The Economics of Population
Growth (1977) followed by The Ultimate Resource (1981), in which he argued
that the relationship between population growth and economic growth was
not as simple as assumed, and that the extent to which population pressure
had an impact on resources was overstated. In his argument Simon suggested
that population was the ultimate resource with the capacity to invent new
technologies that relax resource limits. He also argued that the current views
on population and resource issues fail to take the long view and demographic
problems should not be examined in a short time frame.
It is interesting to note that while this debate was taking place, the Green
Revolution was expanding rapidly in several parts of the developing world.
4 G. Mergos and M. Papanastassiou

Green Revolution is the catchword describing a package of “research, devel-

opment and technology transfer mechanism” in agricultural production
that took place mainly in the 1950s and 1960s. The Green Revolution pro-
duced in the research centres (International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)
and International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT)) of
the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR),
a global public agricultural research partnership, made widely available
new high-yielding varieties of wheat, rice and maize, changing com-
pletely the food supply situation in many parts of the world. Although
the Green Revolution should be credited to the work of a large number
of unknown researchers and scientists of the CGIAR, Norman Borlaug,
one of the founding members of CGIAR, has been named “Father of the
Green Revolution” and has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970
for saving over a billion people from starvation by changing food produc-
tion technology in the new technology package combining high-yielding
varieties of cereal grains with irrigation, modern management techniques,
hybrid seeds, and chemical technology of fertilisers and pesticides.
It is also interesting to note that while the ideas of “resource constraints
and the limits to growth” were popularised, leading to the establishment
of the Club of Rome (Meadows et al. 1972), the research of Hayami and
Ruttan (1971) has put forward and empirically verified an “induced tech-
nical change model” for agricultural development that builds upon the
induced innovation hypothesis of Hicks in his Theory of Wages (1932),
implying that these resource constraints can be relaxed by scientific dis-
covery, technological change and innovation. The empirical evidence
accumulated since the 1970s on the induced technical change hypothesis
of Hayami and Ruttan supports strongly the theory of Boserup, “diffus-
ing completely the population bomb” and shaping an optimistic view
about the global food–population balances.
The debate between Ehrlich and Simon continued in the 1980s
unabated. Simon criticised the conventional wisdom of resource scarcity
arguing that it ignores the long-term decline in wage-adjusted prices of
raw materials, which is in line with the induced innovation hypothesis of
Hicks (1932). Simon argued that increasing wealth and technology make
more resources available, because although supplies are limited physi-
cally they may be viewed as economically indefinite as new substitutes
are assumed to be developed by the market. Simon, as Boserup in 1965,
 1 Food Security and Sustainability... 5

argues that population is the solution to resource scarcities and environ-

mental problems, since people and markets innovate. In this context
it is interesting to mention the famous Simon–Ehrlich scientific wager
in 1980, through the pages of Social Science Quarterly, in which they
agreed betting on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity
over a decade leading up to 1990. Simon had Ehrlich choose five com-
modity metals. He chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten,
with Simon betting that their prices over a decade would decrease, while
Ehrlich said they would increase. Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five com-
modities that were betted on declined in price from 1980 through 1990,
the wager period. However, Ehrlich would have won if the wager was
extended to 30 years, on four out of the five metals.
The food and energy crisis of the 1970s led to a fervent research on food
and energy demand. The International Food Policy Research Institute
(IFPRI) was established in 1975 as a research centre of CGIAR with the
mission to undertake economic research to free the world from hunger
and malnutrition providing research-based policy solutions that sustain-
ably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition. At the same time,
a great deal of research in the World Bank was devoted to the defini-
tion of food security, the causes and the remedies of food insecurity and
research on various aspects of the global food–population balance (see
for example Reutlinger 1978, Reutlinger 1985). Policy research was also
focused on particular problems of food insecurity, such as buffer stock
operation, international finance of food imports for importing countries
in periods of supply shortfalls with the objective of providing evidence-
based policy options (see for example Huddleston et al. 1982). Other
research has focused on the causes of food–population imbalances such
as the observed worldwide rapid increase in grain demand, malnutrition
and poverty, the lack of trickle-down effects of development to the poor,
the proposal for a basic needs approach to poverty alleviation and on
targeted measures to address food insecurity.
Significant attention was also given in that period to a rapidly increasing
component of food demand, feed grain demand (see e.g. Mergos 1989).
The observed rapid increase was in the indirect demand for grains used as
feed in animal production to satisfy the rapidly growing demand for meat;
this effect was called by some the graduation effect on food (grain). Even at
6 G. Mergos and M. Papanastassiou

700
FEED GRAIN
600 CALORIES
POPULATION
500

400

300

200

100

0
1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050

Fig. 1.1 Three indicators of world food demand (1966 = 100). Source:
Adapted from Babcock (2008)

present, feed grain demand is projected to grow rapidly, reaching in 2050

a sevenfold increase compared to 1966, much faster than any other food
item (see Fig. 1.1). The observed rapid increase in feed grain demand is
explained as the result of changes in factors used in the course of economic
growth, especially capital accumulation and labour outflow from agricul-
ture, leading to the introduction in the livestock sector of capital-intensive
techniques of production that are also grain-intensive. This leads to higher
use of feed grain, lower use of traditional feeds and a changing composi-
tion of output, implying long-term prospects for very high growth in feed
grain use in the world (see Mergos and Yotopoulos 1988).
Civil society initiatives have also led at the same time to the estab-
lishment of non-governmental organisations, such as the Worldwatch
Institute, founded in 1974 by Lester Brown, who has been named by
The Washington Post as one of the world’s most influential thinkers, with
the mission to accelerate transition, through research and outreach that
inspire action, to a sustainable world that meets human needs with an
emphasis on renewable energy and food. Brown has helped the shap-
ing of the concept of sustainable development and founded, in 2001,
the Earth Policy Institute with goals to provide a global plan for moving
the world onto an environmentally and economically sustainable path,
to provide examples demonstrating how the plan would work, and to
Another random document with
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 The Beloved Sinner
All the world does not love a lover. It is a cultivated taste, alien to
the natural man, and unknown to childhood. But all the world does
love a sinner, either because he is convertible to a saint, or because
a taste for law-breaking is an inheritance from our first parents, who
broke the one and only law imposed upon them. The little children
whom Fra Lippo Lippi sees standing in a “row of admiration” around
the murderer on the altar step express their innocent interest in
crime. Bayard, “sans peur et sans reproche,” has never stirred the
heart of youth as has Robin Hood, that bold outlaw who “beat and
bound” unpopular sheriffs, and “readjusted the distribution of
property,”—delightful phrase, as old as the world, and as fresh as to-
morrow morning. The terrible and undeserved epithet, “blameless,”
has robbed great Arthur of his just meed of homage. The “Master
Thief” enjoyed, and still enjoys, unmerited popularity.
I sometimes wonder what a man conscious of talent, like the
Master Thief, would have thought if the simple criminologists of his
day—who knew no subtler remedy than hanging—had confronted
him with clinics, and laboratories, and pamphlets on the “disease of
crime.” I sometimes wonder how his able descendants, like the
humorous rogues who stole the gold cup at Ascot; or the wag who
slipped the stolen purses (emptied of their contents) into the pocket
of the Bishop of Lincoln; or the redoubtable Raymond—alias Wirth—
who stole a shipping of Kimberley diamonds and a Gainsborough
portrait, feel about their pathological needs. “The criminal is a sick
man, the prison is his hospital, and the judge who sentenced him is
his physician,” said Dr. Vaughan, dean of the Medical School in the
University of Michigan. “Does a hunting man give up riding to hounds
because he has had a fall?” asked a stalwart “invalid,” serving a
sentence for burglary, of the chaplain who had urged upon him the
security of an honest life.
 It is always animating to hear the convict’s point of view. In fact,
everything appertaining to criminology interests us as deeply as
everything appertaining to pauperism bores and repels us. Some
years ago the “Nineteenth Century” offered its pages as a debating-
ground for this absorbing theme. Arguments were presented by Sir
Alfred Wills, a judge of twenty-one years’ standing, Sir Robert
Anderson, author of “Criminals and Crime,” and Mr. H. J. B.
Montgomery, an ex-convict and a fluent writer, albeit somewhat
supercilious as befitted his estate. He took the bold and popular
stand that society has created the criminal class, that its members
detest the crimes they commit with such apparent zest, and that they
should be “tended and cheered” instead of subjected to the “extreme
stupidity” of prison life. Indeterminate sentences which carry with
them an element of hope, and which should be an incentive to
reform because they imply its possibility, he condemned without
reserve as putting a premium on hypocrisy. But the point which of all
others aroused his just resentment was the demand made by the
two jurists for restitution.
This is the crux of a situation which in the moral law is simplicity
itself; but which the evasiveness of the civil law has unduly
complicated, and which the random humanitarianism of our day has
buried out of sight. Every crime is an offence against the State. It is
also in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred an offence against a
fellow-creature, which fellow-creature is called a victim, and interests
nobody. Sir Alfred Wills and Sir Robert Anderson both held that
thieves, big thieves especially, should be compelled to say what
disposition had been made of stolen property, and that they should
be imprisoned for life if they refused. Anderson was firm in his
insistence that the act of thieving alienates such property actually,
but not legally or morally, from its owner, and that serving a sentence
for robbery does not clear the robber’s title to the goods. He also
pointed out that the most heartless thefts are committed daily at the
expense of people in decent but narrow circumstances, because
such people are compelled to leave their homes unprotected. He
instanced the case of one woman robbed of her scanty savings, and
of another who lost her dead soldier husband’s medals, and the few
poor cherished trinkets he had given her.
 In the matter of restitution, Mr. Montgomery stood fairly and
squarely for the felon’s rights. “The law,” he said, “has nothing to do,
and ought to have nothing to do, with the disposal of the booty”; and
he was happy in the conviction that it would never go so far as to
deprive the thief of the reward of his labour, of the money stolen by
the sweat of his brow. As for staying in jail until such restitution was
made, that was as ridiculous as the suggestion sometimes offered
that the convict’s wages should be paid over to the man he has
robbed. Nobody cares about a man who has been robbed. The
interest felt in the criminal extends itself occasionally to the criminal’s
family, but never to the family he has wronged. In the United States
where robbery is the order of the day, there isn’t sympathy enough to
go ’round among the many who play a losing game. Chicago alone
boasts a record of one hundred and seventy-five hold-ups in two
nights, an amazing tribute to industry and zeal. Many of the victims
were stripped of their coats as well as of their valuables, there being
plenty of time, and no need on the thieves’ part for hurry or disorder.
The Chicago Crimes Commission put the case with commendable
brevity when it said, “Crime is a business here.”
An interesting circumstance recorded in Anderson’s volume is the
reluctance of professional burglars to ply their craft on very cold and
stormy nights. It would seem as though bad weather might be
trusted to stand their friend; but the burglar, a luxury-loving person,
dislikes being drenched or frozen as much as does his honest
neighbour. Happily for his comfort and for his health, a high-speed
motor now enables him to work on sunny days at noon. It is pleasant
to reflect that the experts who robbed three Philadelphia jewellers at
an hour when the shops were full of customers, and the streets were
full of pedestrians, ran no risk from exposure. They may have been
sick men from the psychologist’s point of view, but they were as safe
from bronchitis as they were from the Philadelphia police.
It is an age of specialism, and the criminal, like the scientist, has
specialized. Stealing Liberty Bonds is a field full of promise for youth.
Apparently nothing can shake the confidence of brokers in the
messengers who disappear with one lot of bonds, only to be
released on a suspended sentence, and speedily entrusted with a
second. The term “juvenile delinquency” has been stretched to cover
every offence from murder to missing school. A fourteen-year-old girl
who poisoned a fourteen-month-old baby in Brooklyn, in the summer
of 1919, and who was tried in the Children’s Court, was found guilty
of juvenile delinquency, and committed to a home for delinquent
girls. It is hard to say what else could have been done with a
murderess of such tender years; but the New York authorities should
see to it that Solomon Kramer is the last baby whom Frances
Sulinski kills. She poisoned this one with the single purpose of
implicating in the crime a woman of seventy with whom she had
quarrelled. The poor infant lingered in pain twenty-four hours before
released by death. It is not easy to throw a kindly light upon the
deed; and while a baby’s life is of small value to the State (“as well
be drowned as grow up a tinker,” said Sir Walter Scott), civilization
means that it has a right to protection. The law exists, not for the
punishment of the offender, and not for his reformation, but that the
public may be safe from his hands.
A robust sense of humour might help to straighten out the tangles
which have deranged the simple processes of jurisdiction. When the
court rendered a decision freeing the prison authorities of Tacoma
from all responsibility in the event of a hunger strike, a light dawned
on that stricken town. The I.W.W., who had refused to eat because
they objected to being detained in the county, instead of in the city
jail, were accorded liberty to follow their desires. A threat which for
years had sufficed to throw British and American prisons into
consternation was suddenly found to be harmless to all but the
threateners. What really agitated the citizens of Tacoma just then
was, not so much whether demagogues would consent to eat the
food provided for them, as whether honest men could afford food to
eat.
A comic opera might be staged with Ellis Island as a mise en
scène. The seventy-three “reds,” detained on that asylum as
undesirables, who sent an “ultimatum,” modelled on the Berlin
pattern, to the Congressional Committee, would have charmed
Gilbert and inspired Sullivan. The solemnity with which they notified
the indifferent Congressmen that at half-past eight o’clock, Tuesday
morning, November 25th, 1919, they would declare a hunger strike,
the consequences of which “shall fall upon the head of the
administration of the island,” was surpassed by the calmness with
which they gave warning that they would no longer attend the
hearings of the committee. Like the heroine of Mr. Davidson’s ballad,
who told the Devil she would not stay in hell, these gentlemen
registered themselves as outside the pale of coercion. They seemed
to think that by refusing to eat, they could bend the law to their will,
and that by refusing to have their cases heard, they could stop the
slow process of deportation.
It is painful to record this lack of healthy humour on the part of
political offenders. Ordinary criminals are as a rule neat hands at a
joke, a practical joke especially, and convicts respond alacritously to
all intelligent efforts to amuse them. Comedians, who from time to
time have offered their services to relieve the sad monotony of
prison life, have found their audiences alert and responsive. Not a
joke is lost, not a song or a skit but wins its way to favour. It is this
engaging receptiveness which has made our captive thieves and
cut-throats so dear to the public heart. They dilate with correct
emotions when they hear good music; and, in the dearth of other
diversions, they can produce very creditable entertainments of their
own. The great Sing Sing pageant in honour of Warden Osborne
was full of fun and fancy. It would have done credit to the dramatic
talent of any college in the land. No wonder that we detect a certain
ostentation in the claims made by honest men to familiarity with
rogues. The Honourable T. P. O’Connor published a few years ago a
series of papers with the arrogant title, “Criminals I Have Known.”
Could he have attracted readers by boasting the acquaintanceship of
any other class of fellow-creatures?
The sourness incidental to a grievance deprives the political
offender of this winning vivacity. He is lamentably high-flown in his
language, and he has no sense of the ridiculous. The Sinn Feiners
who wrecked the office of a Dublin newspaper because it had
alluded to one of the men who tried to kill Lord French as a “would-
be assassin,” should expend some of the money received from the
United States (in return for stoning our sailors in Cork and
Queenstown) in the purchase of a dictionary. “Assassin” is as good a
word as “murderer” any day of the week, and a “would-be assassin”
is no other than a “would-be murderer.” The Sinn Feiners explained
in a letter to the editor that the calumniated man was really a “high-
souled youth,” but this goes without the saying. All political offenders
are high-souled youths. It is their sub-title, eligible in oratory and
obituary notices, but not in the simple language of the press.
Mr. W. C. Brownell alludes casually to the social sentiment which
instinctively prefers the criminal to the police; but he declines to
analyze its rationale. Perhaps, as I have already hinted, we may
inherit it from our father, Adam, who could have felt no great
kindness for Saint Michael, the first upholder of the given law. Justice
is an unaccommodating, unappealing virtue. Deep in our hearts is a
distaste for its rulings, and a distrust of the fallible creatures who
administer it. Mr. Howells, writing ten years ago in the “North
American,” condemned without reserve the authority which, however
assailable, is our only bulwark against anarchy. “The State,” he said,
“is a collective despot, mostly inexorable, always irresponsible, and
entirely inaccessible to the personal appeals which have sometimes
moved the obsolete tyrant to pity. In its selfishness and meanness it
is largely the legislated and organized ideal of the lowest and
stupidest of its citizens, whose daily life is nearest the level of
barbarism.”
I am not without hope that the events of the past ten years
modified Mr. Howells’s point of view. If the German State revealed
itself as something perilously close to barbarism, the Allied States
presented a superb concentration of their peoples’ unfaltering
purpose. That the world was saved from degradation too deep to be
measured was due to individual heroism, animated, upheld, and
focused by the State. Though temperamentally conservative, I feel
no shadow of regret for the “obsolete” and very picturesque tyrant
who softened or hardened by caprice. I would rather trust our stupid
and venal authorities, because, while each member of a legislative
body is kind to his own deficiencies, he is hard on his neighbour’s.
Collective criticism is a fair antidote for collective despotism, and
robs it of its terrors.
 If we were less incorrigibly sentimental, we should be more nobly
kind. Sentimentalism is, and has always been, virgin of standards. It
is, and it has always been, insensible to facts. The moralists who, in
the first years of the war, protested against American munitions
because they were fresh-made for purposes of destruction, would
have flung the victory into Germany’s hands because her vast stores
of munitions had been prepared in times of peace. When the news of
the Belgian campaign sickened the heart of humanity, more than one
voice was raised to say that England had, by her treatment of
militant suffragists (a treatment so feeble, so wavering, so irascible,
and so soft-hearted that it would not have crushed a rebellious snail),
forfeited her right to protest against the dishonouring of Belgian
women. The moral confusion which follows mental confusion with a
sure and steady step is equally dangerous and distasteful. It denies
our integrity, and it makes a mock of our understanding.
An irritated Englishman, who must have come into close quarters
with British pacifists,—the least lovely of their species,—has
protested in “Blackwood’s Magazine” that the one thing dearer than
the criminal to the heart of the humanitarian is the enemy of his
country, whose offences he condones, and whose punishment he
sincerely pities. Thus it happened that British women joined
American women in protesting against the return of the cattle stolen
during the last months of the war from northern France. They said—
what was undoubtedly true—that German children needed the milk.
French children also needed the milk (witness the death-rates from
tuberculosis in and about Lille), but this concerned them less. The
herds belonged to France, and their sympathy went out to the
raiders rather than to the raided.
In fact all pacifists seem disposed to look benignly upon the “noble
old piracy game.” The Honourable Bertrand Russell, whose
annoyance at England’s going to war deepened into resentment at
her winning it (a consummation which, to speak truth, he did his best
to avert), expressed regret that the sufferings of Belgium should
have been mistakenly attributed to Germany. Not Berlin, he said, but
war must be held to blame; and if war were a natural phenomenon,
like an earth quake or a thunderstorm, he would have been right.
The original Attila was not displeased to be called the “Scourge of
God,” and pious Christians of the fifth century acquiesced in this
shifting of liability. They said, and they probably believed, that
Heaven had chosen a barbarian to punish them for their sins. To-day
we are less at home in Zion, and more insistent upon international
law. The sternest duty of civilization is the assigning of responsibility
for private and for public crimes as the rules of evidence direct.
In the Christmas issue of the “Atlantic Monthly,” 1919, another
Englishman of letters, Mr. Clutton-Brock, preached a sermon to
Americans (we get a deal of instruction from our neighbours), the
burden of which was the paramount duty of forgiveness. Naturally he
illustrated his theme with an appeal for Germany, because there is
so much to be forgiven her. That he made no distinction between the
injuries which a citizen of Lille or Louvain, and the injuries which a
reader of the “Atlantic Monthly” has to forgive, was eminently right,
forgiveness being due for the greatest as well as for the least of
offences. The Frenchman or the Belgian who forgives “from his
heart” reaches a higher standard than we do; but the ethics of
Christianity bind him to that standard. It is his supreme spiritual test.
What was less endearing in Mr. Clutton-Brock’s sermon was the
playful manner in which he made light of wrongs which, to say the
least, were not matters for sport. We were called on to pardon, “not
as an act of virtue, but in good-humour, because we are all absurd,
and all need forgiveness.... We all fail, and we have no right to say
that another man’s, or another nation’s, failure is worse than our
own.... We must govern our behaviour to each other by the axiom
that no man is to be judged by his past.”
These sentences aptly illustrate my contention that the
sentimentalist is as unconcerned with standards as with facts.
“Absurd” is not the word to apply to Germany’s campaign in France
and Flanders. A man whose home has been burned and whose wife
has been butchered cannot be expected to regard the incident as an
absurdity, or to recall it with good-humour. The sight of a child
bayoneted on the roadside (five wounds in one poor little body
picked up near Namur) arouses something deep and terrible in the
human heart. To say that one man’s failure is no worse than another
man’s failure, that one nation’s failure is no worse than another
nation’s failure, is to deny any vital distinction between degrees of
right and wrong. It is to place the German Kaiser by the side of
Belgium’s King, and George Washington by the side of George the
Third.
And by what shall men be judged, if not by their past? What other
evidence can we seek? What other test can we apply? A man who
has run away with his neighbour’s wife may not care to repeat the
offence; he may be cured forever of this particular form of
covetousness; but he is not welcomed in sedately conducted
households. A defaulter may be converted to the belief that honesty
is the best policy; but few there are who will entrust him with funds,
and fewer still who will receive him as a gentleman. If such
behaviour is, as Mr. Clutton-Brock authoritatively asserts, opposed to
“a Christian technique,” it defines the value of facts, and it holds
upright the standard of honour.
The well-meaning ladies and gentlemen who flood society with
appeals to “open the prison door,” and let our good-will shine as a
star upon political prisoners, seem curiously indifferent as to what
the liberated ones will do with their liberty. There are few of us so
base as to desire to deprive our fellow-creatures of sunlight and the
open road. There are not many of us so unpractical as to want to
keep them a burden upon the State, if we have any assurance that
they will not be a menace to the State when released. Sufficiency,
security, and freedom have been defined as the prerogatives of
civilized man. The cry of the revolutionist for freedom is met by the
call of sober citizens for security. Sympathy for the lawless (the
beloved sinner) is not warranted in denying equity to the law-abiding,
who have a right to protection from the Republic which they
voluntarily serve and obey.
 The Virtuous Victorian
When Miss Amy Lowell, in her essay on Émile Verhaeren, says
that the influence of Zola on the younger writers of France and
Belgium was necessary “to down the long set of sentimental
hypocrisies known in England as ‘Victorian,’” she repeats a formula
which has been in popular use for many years, and to which we
attach no very exact significance. “Early-Victorian,” “mid-Victorian,”
we use the phrases glibly, and without being aware that the mental
attitude to which we refer is sometimes not Victorian at all, but
Georgian. Take, for example, that fairly famous sentiment about the
British navy being “if possible, more distinguished in its domestic
virtues than in its national importance.” Nothing more oppressively
smug was ever uttered in the reign of the virtuous Queen; yet it was
written by the most humorous and most pitiless of Georgian
novelists, and it expressed the conviction of her soul.
When we permit ourselves to sneer at Victorian hypocrisies, we
allude, as a rule, to the superficial observance of religious practices,
and to the artificial reticence concerning illicit sexual relations. The
former affected life more than it did literature; the latter affected
literature more than it did life. A resolute silence is apt to imply or
involve an equally resolute denial; and there came a time when
certain plain truths were denied because there was no other way of
keeping them out of sight. Novelists and poets conformed to a
standard which was set by the taste of their day. So profoundly was
the great Victorian laureate influenced by this taste that he grew
reluctant to accept those simple old English stories, those charming
old English traditions, the propriety or impropriety of which had never
been a matter for concern. His “fair Rosamond” believes herself a
wedded wife, and so escapes culpability. His “Maid Marian” wanders
through Sherwood Forest under the respectable chaperonage of her
father, and will not permit to Robin Hood the harmless liberties
common among betrothed lovers.
 “Robin, I will not kiss thee,
For that belongs to marriage; but I hold thee
The husband of my heart; the noblest light
That ever flashed across my life, and I
Embrace thee with the kisses of the soul.
Robin: I thank thee.”

It is a bit frigid and a bit stilted for the merry outlaws. “If love were
all,” we might admit that conventionalism had chilled the laureate’s
pen; but, happily for the great adventures we call life and death, love
is not all. The world swings on its way, peopled by other men than
lovers; and it is to Tennyson we owe the most splendid denial of
domesticity—and duty—that was ever made deathless by verse.
With what unequalled ardour his Ulysses abandons home and
country, the faithful, but ageing, Penelope, the devoted, but dull,
Telemachus, and the troublesome business of law-making! He does
not covet safety. He does not enjoy the tranquil reward of his
labours, nor the tranquil discharge of his obligations. He will drink life
to the lees. He will seek the still untravelled world, and take what
buffets fortune sends him.

“For my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles whom we knew.”

Poor Penelope! What chance has she against such glad decision,
such golden dreams! It is plain that the Ithacan navy was less
distinguished than the British navy for the development of domestic
virtues. Until such time as Germany fulfils her threat, and drives the
“bastard tongue of canting island pirates” from its hold on the
civilized world, Tennyson’s Ulysses will survive as the embodiment of
the adventurous spirit which brooks no restraint, and heeds no
liability.
The great Victorian novelists were well aware that, albeit the
average man does his share of love-making, he neither lives nor dies
for love. Mr. Edmund Gosse, reared in the strictest sect of Plymouth
Brethren, and professing religion at ten, was nevertheless permitted
by his father to read the novels of Dickens, because they dealt with
the passion of love in a humorous manner. More often they deal with
it in a purely perfunctory manner, recognizing it as a prelude to
marriage, and as something to which the novelist must not forget to
make an occasional reference. Nicholas Nickleby is a young man
and a hero. Consequently an assortment of female virtues and of
female charms is labelled, docketed, provided with ringlets and a
capacity for appropriate swooning,—and behold, Nicholas has a
wife. Kate Nickleby’s husband is even more sketchily outlined. He
has a name, and—we are told—an impetuous and generous
disposition. He makes his appearance when a suitor is needed,
stands up to be married when a husband is called for, and that is all
there is of him. But what do these puppets matter in a book which
gives us Mrs. Nickleby, Vincent Crummles, Fanny Squeers, and the
ever-beloved Kenwigses. It took a great genius to enliven the
hideous picture of Dotheboys Hall with the appropriate and immortal
Fanny, whom we could never have borne to lose. It took a great
genius to evolve from nothingness the name “Morleena Kenwigs.”
So perfect a result, achieved from a mere combination of letters,
confers distinction on the English alphabet.
The charge of conventionalism brought against Thackeray and
Trollope has more substance, because these novelists essayed to
portray life soberly and veraciously. “Trollope,” says Sir Leslie
Stephen, “was in the awkward position of a realist, bound to ignore
realities.” Thackeray was restrained, partly by the sensitive propriety
of British readers who winced at the frank admission of sexual
infirmities, and partly by the quality of his own taste. In deference to
the public, he forbore to make Arthur Pendennis the lover of Fanny
Bolton; and when we remember the gallant part that Fanny plays
when safely settled at Clavering, her loyalty to her old friend, Bows,
and her dexterity in serving him, we are glad she went unsmirched
into that sheltered port.
The restrictions so cheerfully accepted by Thackeray, and his
reticence—which is merely the reticence observed by every
gentleman of his day—leave him an uncrippled spectator and
analyst of the complicated business of living. The world is not nearly
so simple a place as the sexualists seem to consider it. To the author
of “Vanity Fair” it was not simple at all. Acting and reacting upon one
another, his characters crowd the canvas, their desires and
ambitions, their successes and failures, inextricably interwoven into
one vast social scheme. It is not the decency of Thackeray’s novels
which affronts us (we are seldom unduly aware that they are
decent), but the severity with which he judges his own creations, and
his rank and shameless favouritism. What business has he to coddle
Rawdon Crawley (“honest Rawdon,” forsooth!), to lay siege to our
hearts with all the skill of a great artificer, and compel our liking for
this fool and reprobate? What business has he to pursue Becky
Sharp like a prosecuting attorney, to trip her up at every step, to
betray, to our discomfiture, his cold hostility? He treats Blanche
Amory in the same merciless fashion, and no one cares. But Becky!
Becky, that peerless adventuress who, as Mr. Brownell reminds us,
ran her memorable career before psychology was thought of as an
essential element of fiction. Becky whose scheming has beguiled our
weary hours, and recompensed us for the labour of learning to read.
How shall we fathom the mental attitude of a novelist who could
create such a character, control her fluctuating fortunes, lift her to
dizzy heights, topple her to ruin, extricate her from the dust and
débris of her downfall,—and hate her!
Trollope, working on a lower level, observant rather than creative,
was less stern a moralist than Thackeray, but infinitely more cautious
of his foot-steps. He kept soberly in the appointed path, and never
once in thirty years trod on the grass or flower-beds. Lady Glencora
Palliser thinks, indeed, of leaving her husband; but she does not do
it, and her continency is rewarded after a fashion which is very
satisfactory to the reader. Mr. Palliser aspires somewhat stiffly to be
the lover of Lady Dumbello; but that wise worldling, ranking love the
least of assets, declines to make any sacrifice at its shrine. Trollope
unhesitatingly and proudly claimed for himself the quality of
harmlessness. “I do believe,” he said, “that no girl has risen from the
reading of my pages less modest than she was before, and that
some girls may have learned from them that modesty is a charm
worth possessing.”
This is one of the admirable sentiments which should have been
left unspoken. It is a true word as far as it goes, but more suggestive
of “Little Women,” or “A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite’s Life,” than of
those virile, varied and animated novels which make no appeal to
immaturity. In Trollope’s teeming world, as in the teeming world
about us, a few young people fall in love and are married, but this is
an infrequent episode. Most of his men and women, like the men
and women whom we know, are engrossed in other activities. Once,
indeed, Bishop Proudie wooed and won Mrs. Proudie. Once
Archdeacon Grantly wooed and won Mrs. Grantly. But neither of
these gentlemen could possibly have belonged to “the great cruising
brotherhood of the Pilgrims of Love.” “Le culte de la femme” has
never been a popular pastime in Britain, and Trollope was the last
man on the island to have appreciated its significance. He preferred
politics, the hunting-field, and the church.
Yet surely Archdeacon Grantly is worth a brace of lovers. With
what sincerity he is drawn, and with what consummate care! A
churchman who, as Sir Leslie Stephen somewhat petulantly
observes, “gives no indication of having any religious views
whatever, beyond a dislike to dissenters.” A solidly respectable
member of provincial clerical society, ambitious, worldly, prizing
wealth, honouring rank, unspiritual, unprogressive,—but none the
less a man who would have proved his worth in the hour of
England’s trial.
It is a testimony to the power of fiction that, having read with
breathless concern and through countless pages Mr. Britling’s
reflections on the war, my soul suddenly cried out within me for the
reflections of Archdeacon Grantly. Mr. Britling is an acute and
sensitive thinker. The archdeacon’s mental processes are of the
simplest. Mr. Britling has winged his triumphant flight from “the
clumsy, crawling, snobbish, comfort-loving caterpillar of Victorian
England.” The archdeacon is still confessedly a grub. Mr. Britling has
“truckled to no domesticated god.” The archdeacon’s deity is open to
such grievous innuendoes. Yet I wish I could have stood on the
smooth lawn of Plumstead, and have heard what the archdeacon
had to say when he learned that an English scholar and gentleman
had smuggled out of England, by the help of a female “confidential
agent,” a treacherous appeal to the President of the United States,
asking that pressure should be brought upon fighting Englishmen in
the interests of peace. I wish I could have heard the cawing rooks of
Plumstead echo his mighty wrath. For there is that in the heart of a
man, even a Victorian churchman with a love of preferment and a
distaste for dissenters, which holds scatheless the sacred thing
called honour.
Trollope is as frank about the archdeacon’s frailties as Mr. Wells is
frank about Mr. Britling’s frailties. In piping days of peace, the
archdeacon’s contempt for Mr. Britling would have been as sincere
and hearty as Mr. Britling’s contempt for the archdeacon. But under
the hard, heroic discipline of war there would have come to the
archdeacon, as to Mr. Britling, a white dawn of revelation. Both men
have the liberating qualities of manhood.
It is always hard to make an elastic phrase fit with precision. We
know what we mean by Victorian conventions and hypocrisies, but
the perpetual intrusion of blinding truths disturbs our point of view.
The new Reform bill and the extension of the suffrage were hardy
denials of convention. “The Origin of Species” and “Zoölogical
Evidences as to Man’s Place in Nature” were not published in the
interests of hypocrisy. There was nothing oppressively respectable
about “The Ring and the Book”; and Swinburne can hardly be said to
have needed correction at Zola’s hands. These mid-Victorian
products have a savour of freedom about them, and so has “The
Ordeal of Richard Feverel.” Even the Homeric eloquence of Ruskin
was essentially the eloquence of the free. The two lessons he sought
to drive home to his reluctant readers were, first, that Englishmen
were not living on an illuminated earth spot, under the especial
patronage of the Almighty; and, second, that no one was called by
Providence to the enjoyment of wealth and security. If such
unpleasant and reiterated truths—as applicable to the United States
to-day as they were to Victoria’s England—are “smug,” then
Jeremiah is sugar-coated, and the Baptist an apostle of ease.
The English have at all times lacked the courage of their emotions,
but not the emotions themselves. Their reticence has stood for
strength as well as for stiffness. The pre-Raphaelites, indeed,
surrendered their souls with docility to every wavelet of feeling, and
produced something iridescent, like the shining of wet sand. Love,
according to their canon, was expressed with transparent ease. It
was “a great but rather sloppy passion,” says Mr. Ford Madox
Hueffer, “which you swooned about on broad general lines.” A pre-
Raphaelite corsair languished as visibly as a pre-Raphaelite seraph.
He could be bowled over by a worsted ball; but he was at least more
vigorous and more ruddy than a cubist nude. One doubted his
seared conscience and his thousand crimes; but not his ability to
walk unassisted downstairs.
The Victorian giants were of mighty girth. They trod the earth with
proud and heavy steps, and with a strength of conviction which was
as vast and tranquil as the plains. We have parted with their
convictions and with their tranquillity. We have parted also with their
binding prejudices and with their standards of taste. Freedom has
come to us, not broadening down

“from precedent to precedent,”

but swiftly and comprehensively. There are no more taboos, no more

silent or sentimental hypocrisies. We should now know a great many
interesting details concerning the Marquis of Steyne and the Duke of
Omnium, if these two imposing figures had not passed forever from
our ken. We should have searchlights thrown upon Becky Sharp, if
Becky had not escaped into the gloom. Her successors sin
exhaustively, and with a lamentable lack of esprit. We are bidden to
scrutinize their transgressions, but Becky’s least peccadillo is more
engaging than all their broken commandments. The possibility of
profound tediousness accompanying perfect candour dawns slowly
on the truth-tellers of fiction. It takes a great artist, like Edith
Wharton, to recognize and deplore “the freedom of speech which
never arrives at wit, and the freedom of act which never makes for
romance.”
 Woman Enthroned
The Michigan magistrate who gave orders that a stalwart male
angel presiding over the gateway of a cemetery should be recast in
feminine mould may have been an erring theologian and a doubtful
art-critic; but that he was a sound-hearted American no one can
deny. He was not thinking of Azrael the mighty who had garnered
that little harvest of death; or of Michael, great leader of the “fighting
seraphim,” whose blade

“smote and felled

Squadrons at once”;

or of Gabriel the messenger. Holy Writ was as remote from his

mental vision as was Paradise Lost. He was thinking very properly of
the “angel in the house,” and this feminine ideal was affronted by the
robust outlines, no less than by the robust virtues, associated with
the heavenly host. Cowley’s soothing compromise, which was
designed as a compliment to a lady, and which, instead of unsexing
angels, endowed them with a double line of potencies,—

“They are than Man more strong, and more than Woman
sweet,”—

is not easily expressed in art. The very gallant Michigan gentleman

simplified the situation by eliminating the masculine element. He
registered his profession of faith in the perfectibility of women.
It is awkward to be relegated to the angelic class, and to feel that
one does not fit. Intelligent feminists sometimes say that chivalry—
that inextinguishable point of view which has for centuries survived
its own death-notices—is more disheartening than contempt.
Chivalry is essentially protective. It is rooted in the consciousness of
superior strength. It is expansively generous and scrimpingly just. It
will not assure to women a fair field and no favours, which is the
salvation of all humanity; but it will protect them from the
consequences of their own deeds, and that way lies perdition.
Down through the ages we see the working of this will. Rome
denied to women all civic rights, but allowed them many privileges.
They were not permitted to make any legal contract. They were not
permitted to bequeath their own fortunes, or—ordinarily—to give
testimony in court. But they might plead ignorance of the law, “as a
ground for dissolving an obligation,” which, if often convenient, was
always demoralizing. Being somewhat contemptuously absolved
from the oath of allegiance in the Middle Ages, they were as a
consequence immune from outlawry. On the other hand, the severity
with which they were punished for certain crimes which were
presumed to come easy to them—poisoning, husband-murder,
witchcraft (King Jamie was not the only wiseacre who marvelled that
there should be twenty witches to one warlock)—is evidence of fear
on the legislators’ part. The oldest laws, the oldest axioms which
antedate all laws, betray this uneasy sense of insecurity. “Day and
night must women be held by their protectors in a state of
dependence,” says Manu, the Hindu Noah, who took no female with
him in his miraculously preserved boat, but was content with his own
safety, and trusted the continuance of the race to the care and
ingenuity of the gods.
In our day, and in our country, women gained their rights (I use the
word “rights” advisedly, because, though its definition be disputed,
every one knows what it implies) after a prolonged, but not
embittered struggle. Certain States moved so slowly that they were
over-taken by a Federal Amendment. Even with the franchise to
back them, American women have a hard time making their way in
the professions, though a great deal of courtesy is shown them by
professional men. They have a hard time making their way in trades,
where the unions block their progress. They have a very small share
of political patronage, and few good positions on the civil lists.
Whether the best interests of the country will be advanced or
retarded by a complete recognition of their claims—which implies
giving them an even chance with men—is a point on which no one
can speak with authority. The absence of data leaves room only for
surmise. Women are striving to gain this “even chance” for their own
sakes, which is lawful and reasonable. Their public utterances, it is
true, dwell pointedly on the regeneration of the world. This also is
lawful and reasonable. Public utterances have always dwelt on the
regeneration of the world, since the apple was eaten and Paradise
closed its gates.
Meanwhile American chivalry, a strong article and equal to
anything Europe ever produced, clings passionately and persistently
to its inward vision. Ellen Key speaks casually of “the vices which
men call woman’s nature.” If Swedish gentlemen permit themselves
this form of speech, it finds no echo in our loyal land. Two things an
American hates to do,—hold a woman accountable for her
misdeeds, and punish her accordingly. When Governor Craig of
North Carolina set aside the death-sentence which had been passed
upon a murderess, and committed her to prison for life, he gave to
the public this plain and comprehensive statement: “There is no
escape from the conclusion that Ida Bell Warren is guilty of murder,
deliberate and premeditated. Germany executed the woman spy;
England did not. The action of the military Governor of Belgium was
condemned by the conscience of the world. The killing of this woman
would send a shiver through North Carolina.”
Apart from the fact that Edith Cavell was not a spy, and that her
offence was one which has seldom in the world’s history been so
cruelly punished, Governor Craig’s words deserve attention. He
explicitly exempted a woman, because she was a woman, from the
penalty which would have been incurred by a man. Incidentally he
was compelled to commute the death-sentence of her confederate,
as it was hardly possible to send the murderous wife to prison, and
her murderous accomplice to the chair. That the execution of Mrs.
Warren would have sent a “shiver” through North Carolina is
doubtless true. The Governor had received countless letters and