Macro Evaluation of the Position and Importance of Food Security and Water Security Programs in the Upstream Documents of the Country in the Last Four Decades

Strategic plans approved by the competent authorities in the form of upstream documents are a suitable indicator for expressing the policies of any country including the country's strategies related to water and food security. In this research more than 50 documents were identified in the three main areas of water, environment and agriculture to examine the mentioned issues in Iran. The documents included the upstream documents in the field of water and agriculture and were explicitly or implicitly related to food and water security. These documents were examined using quantitative analysis on frequency. First, the counted upstream documents were analyzed for 4 axes, 14 sub-axes and 36 components. Then the amount of repetition of each was evaluated in the introduced documents. The highest level of attention of the policy maker has been given to the "political-administrative-legal" axis and then the "social-economic" axis. By using the analysis of the frequency, the sections that were important from the point of view of the law and the policy maker was identified. The results obtained from these sections showed the legislator's attention and the course of strategies in time which form three time periods of (a) first 1380-1358, (b) second 1381-1390, and (c) third 1391-1400 (Iranian Calendar). This showed the changes in the level of attention each axis received from the legislative and policy making authorities over time. The results showed that the attention of politicians and legislators has changed from a specific axis (organization administrative legal) to a uniform and one-size-fits-all attention to all the examined axes, which shows a positive evolution in the policy of water resources and agriculture.