Problematic quantifications - an example from food security studies.

What is it about?

Over the course of human history food security has represented a primary challenge for civilizations and societies. In the light of the projected trends of population expansion in the forthcoming decades, its primary importance in the global agenda has never decreased. Our contribution to this debate comes in the form of a critique of a paper recently published in the literature, Badur et al. (2016). In their work, the authors suggest that continuous improvements in agricultural techniques and dietary re-adaptation and change will lead in the near future (2050) to a reduced use of land to meet human nutritional needs, even when factoring in a projected human population of 10 billion people. We show that the quantification rests on dubious hypotheses, at odds with present understanding from the field of system ecology, and neglects the core issue that resides in fundamental asymmetries in the food distribution between rich and poor countries. Thus, a political problem is reframed as a technical one, by mobilizing crisp numbers and analytic prowess to convey an impression of prediction and control. We warn that this might veil important underlying ethical issues.

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Why is it important?

When is quantification an help to decision and when is it plain obfuscation? Methods are needed to tell the two apart. In this short work we try sensitivity auditing and quantitative story telling as methods to carry out an analysis of contemporary narratives on food security as an issue for technology to solve. We argue that this is a way to re-frame and anesthetize a political-problem is as a technical one.