Food insecurity and famine a threat to the world

The 1996 World Food Summit defined food security as: ‘when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’.This depends on people being able to buy food or obtain it in other ways, such as in exchange for their labour or other services, or by borrowing from their extended family or community. This, in turn, depends on them having sufficient income, savings and other material assets, skills or social connections to obtain food. Food security is not just a question of there being enough food available – rather, it reflects the fact that people do not have equal access to food because of differences in the resources they possess and other economic, social and political factors, including the price of food in local and global markets.Control of the distribution of food within individual households is another important dimension: children depend on what adults give them; male children and adults often get more food than females; and providing adequate food for elderly family members may not be a priority when times are hard. There can be pockets of food insecurity almost anywhere – within countries, communities and families. Food shortages can be transitory or long-term.

All of this means that there are many different ways of improving people’s ability to obtain food (for ways of visualizing the variety of approaches. These include improving farming and food production techniques, drought mitigation measures (such as soil and water conservation) and better management of natural resources such as forests and watersheds. They also include actions to support livelihoods in general, such as projects to create jobs and increase incomes, cash transfers, savings and credit programme, crop insurance, social protection, ensuring security of land rights or access to common land, clean water and better sanitation (poor health is an important contributor to malnutrition), education for women (an important factor in reducing malnutrition at household level), supporting local markets for food and other products (through better access roads and footpaths, or better methods of packaging and preserving perishable products for sale) and encouraging wider community participation in economic and social development initiatives to improve the situation of marginalized groups. Such initiatives can be undertaken locally, to tackle pockets of food insecurity, or contribute to more widespread programme. There is ample opportunity for local-level organisation to become involved.