000 02349cam a2200229 4500500
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041 _afre
042 _adc
100 1 0 _aJanin, Pierre
_eauthor
245 0 0 _aThe Complexity of the Risk of Food Insecurity in the Sahel
260 _c2009.
500 _a72
520 _aMany definitions of risk actually coexist in the literature of the social sciences. In geography, for instance, there is no longer a unique conceptual framework. For the past few years, different methodological approaches have been developed to measure risk. In this article, we argue that risk does not only depend on the geographic and the temporal scale the indicators have been collected but it also depends on the way their spatial dimensions and their territorial impact have been understood. Many geographical studies place the emphasis on environmental factors of risk and their influence on community-based societies. However, this conception of risk leads to a major misunderstanding in food risk analysis : external, apparent and macro-scale risk factors, such as aridity, spatial marginalization and poverty are commonly overvalued in public policy decisions. For these reasons, we think it is important to be careful while consulting thematic maps with indicators of questionable quality. Even if the geographical dimensions of food insecurity are gradually gaining in importance in food alert systems, it nevertheless seems to us that many interventions (by food distribution or food shortage) are still missing a great part of spatial and social heterogeneity and time uncertainty of risk. Hopefully, most NGOs involved in food security and vulnerability programmes rely on micro-level investigation. We argue that it is from now on essential to take in account both the permanent and ambivalent interactions between different local contexts of food production and consumption, human perceptions of risks in particular through multipolar collective family units' decisions.
690 _ascale
690 _arisk
690 _aindicators
690 _aFood insecurity
690 _atime
690 _avulnerability
786 0 _nAnnales de géographie | o 668 | 4 | 2009-08-01 | p. 430-448 | 0003-4010
856 4 1 _uhttps://shs.cairn.info/journal-annales-de-geographie-2009-4-page-430?lang=en&redirect-ssocas=7080
999 _c449106
_d449106