Global food security is indeed a complex issue. If you are unfamiliar with it or wonder what it really means, we encourage you to read a brief overview of the problem on the Global Food Security tab of our webpage.

Because numerous hurdles and complexities exacerbate the challenge of achieving a food secure world, we have developed a new set of documents we are calling Resources for Researchers that we hope may better inform policy-makers, educators and citizens about the issue. With this effort, we hope to live up to our mandate to bring evidence to bear on difficult issues confronting the United States and the world.

This week we are pleased to launch this new product. Our work on the effort is a first round, as with this posting we address a few of the issues that complicate the task of ensuring global food security. They include biodiversity, genetic engineering of seeds, land tenure and land grabs, and orphan crops. We are building additional topic areas including climate change and forestry for release in the future.

With this new addition we hope you will gain a greater understanding about why we at The Lugar Center consider global food security such a critical issue for the world to address in the 21st Century. There are more than 800 million people across the globe who are hungry every day. With a world population estimated to reach 9 billion by 2050, changing diets of more affluent populations, growing urbanization, and the volatile effects of climate change, we have much work ahead of us to eliminate global hunger.

We see this project as a collaborative one, and we will update Resources periodically as best we can. If we’ve missed a major recent study or thought piece, please let us know. We believe that better information leads to better solutions.

Lori Rowley is the Director of Global Food Security and Aid Effectiveness at The Lugar Center. Dr. Connie Veillette is a Senior Fellow in Global Food Security and Aid Effectiveness at The Lugar Center.