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Food Security: Overview
Back to Food Security main page. Some 840 million people in the world don't have enough food for their daily needs. The great majority of them—799 million—live in developing countries in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Emergencies, such as drought, floods, and war, are responsible for only 5-10% of the hunger in the world today. For most hungry people, food shortages are simply a fact of everyday life. In a world where obesity is epidemic in some countries, 25,000 people die daily of hunger and poverty in others.
There is some good news, in that the number of undernourished people in the developing world has been declining steadily. But it is not declining rapidly enough to prevent tragic consequences. In 1996, the World Food Summit, an event sponsored by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, set a goal to halve the number of hungry people in the world by 2015. Five years later, the FAO reported, "progress has virtually ground to a halt.... If we continue at the current pace, we will reach the WFS goal more than 100 years late."
The Green Revolution of the 1970s is credited with improvements in agricultural technology and increased production around the world. Increased production meant lower food prices that benefited poor consumers. But questions have been raised about the value of such a largely technological approach, particularly in terms of equity. Some say it benefited wealthy farmers at the expense of poorer farmers, and its wide use of fertilizers and pesticides caused ecological problems in some parts of the world, leading researchers to seek more sustainable approaches.
As the world's population continues to swell toward 8.1 billion by 2030, even advocates of the Green Revolution agree that increasing production won't feed everyone. "Despite the successes of the Green Revolution, the battle to ensure food security for hundreds of millions of miserably poor people is far from won," says Norman Borlaug, who received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his work to increase food production around the world that sparked the Green Revolution.
The quest for global food security
 Food security, according to the FAO Committee on World Food Security, means that "all people at all times have physical and economic access to the basic foods they need." Food security occurs at the household level. It's not enough to produce surplus food if it can't get to those who need it, if those who need it can't afford it, or if they don't know how to use it. Food security depends on household income, access, and knowledge. It is based on sustainable agriculture that doesn't deplete environmental resources such as soil and water for today's needs, but husbands them for future generations.
In the developing countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, food security is constantly threatened by the pressures of population, the underinvestment in infrastructure, the degradation of the environment, and the constraints of natural resources. Malnourished children are of particular concern because they are prone to illness and have trouble learning in school. "It seems obvious that a child will be malnourished if he or she does not have enough food, but the causes are much more complex and interrelated than that. They range from factors as broad as political instability to those as specific as diarrheal disease," reports the International Food Policy Research Institute. (Overcoming Child Malnutrition in Developing Countries, 2000.)
Food aid in a crisis, though important, is of limited help. Prosperous countries and their citizens would help more by encouraging developing countries to invest in:
- agricultural research that empowers people to feed themselves
; - infrastructure, such as roads and clean water, to make sure food reaches those in need and is safe
; and - education, to help people leave poverty and learn how to keep themselves and their children healthy.
The world must not be satisfied with gradual progress in reducing hunger. "Unless hunger is dealt with effectively," the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports, "prospects for achieving other goals, such as universal education, maternal health, and environmental sustainability, will be severely compromised." Indeed, food security is as vital to world security as it is to a human life.
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