The Evolving Sphere of Food Security seeks to answer two important questions: How do the priorities and challenges of achieving food security change over time as countries develop economically? And how do the policies used to promote food security in one country affect nutrition, food access, natural resources, and national security in other countries? The volume presents the many faces and facets of food security—their symptoms, their roots, and their possible remedies—through the lens of a multidisciplinary group of scholars. The authors share personal stories of research and policy advising from their field experiences to provide readers with a real-world sense of the opportunities and challenges involved in promoting food security at local to global scales. Their observations from countries around the world demonstrate how food security is tied to security of many other kinds: energy, water, health, climate, the environment, and national security. The book’s main goal is to connect these areas in a way that tells an integrated story about human lives, resource use, and the policy process—a story about global food security.

The international community has long recognized China's effort to produce enough food to feed its growing population. Tremendous progress has been achieved in agricultural productivity growth, farmer's income, and poverty alleviation during the reform period. China's experience demonstrates the importance of institutional change, technological development, price and market liberalization, and rural development in improving food security and agricultural productivity in a nation with limited land and other natural resources. While we are interested in farm-sector productivity and rural incomes, in general, most of this article focuses on a narrower set of issues, especially the role of technology in China's food economy. Rural development in China is a complicated process and will require good policies beyond the way the government must manage agriculture technology. Issues of land management, fiscal and financial policy, and many other issues are equally as important. In fact, in a recent conference on land tenure in Beijing, D. Gale Johnson convincingly argued that land reform is critical in promoting economic modernization of both the rural farm and non-farm sectors. We agree. Unfortunately, space limitations preclude us from giving more emphasis to these issues in this paper.