Food Security: Meaning and Need for Food Security

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FAO defines food security as a state of affairs in which all people at all times have access to safe and nutritious food to maintain healthy and active life. To achieve this, two conditions must be met: safe, nutritious, and quantitatively and qualitatively adequate food must be provided. Rich and poor, male and female, old and young must all have access to it.

Food security thus has three dimensions:

(a) Availability of sufficient quantities of food of appropriate quality supplied through domestic production or imports;


(b) Access by households and individuals to appropriate foods for a nutritious diet, and

(c) Optimal uptake of nourishment in terms of sustaining diet, clean water and adequate sanitation, together with health care.

In fact, food security is not just about growing more food. It is about who can buy food and where the food is available. It is also about what kind of food is on the table, who eats it and when. It is about public health issues such as drinking, water supply and sanitation.

On a global level, food security for all requires that the supply of food be adequate to meet the total demand for food. While this is a necessary condition for the achievement of food security, it is by no means sufficient. Currently, enough food is produced globally, yet some 800 million people in developing countries have inadequate access to food, fundamentally because they lack the ability to purchase.

Need for Food Security:

Within countries, the food-insecure poor are found in different subgroups, differentiated by location, occupational patterns, asset ownership, race, ethnicity, age and gender. Most of the poor and food-insecure live in rural areas. They are landless or unable to create a food-secure livelihoods on the land available to them.


In urban areas, household food security is primarily a problem of low real wage rates and low levels of employment. Food deficiency and malnutrition tend to be less prevalent in urban areas. But they could become increasingly important problems in the future as the rate of urbanization increases.

Having adequate household access to food is necessary but not sufficient to ensure that all household members consume an adequate diet. By the same token, consuming an adequate diet is necessary but not sufficient for maintaining a healthy nutritional status.

At the household level, access to food can depend on factors such as the age and sex of family members, and the state of their health. In many countries, female headed households with no adult males are especially likely to have insufficient food. Infants and children, especially girls and children born lower in the birth order, are also less likely than other family members to receive sufficient food.

1. Demographic Trends:

High rate of population growth is a big threat to future food security. Population growth is occurring fastest in the developing countries with demographers expecting 97 per cent of all population growth in the next 25 years to occur in these countries.


The developing economies are by no means homogeneous in terms of demographic trends. The LDCs are characterised by much higher population growth than are the transitional economies, with the latter projected to experience an absolute decline over the period 1999-2015. They have experienced a more rapid rate of growth of urbanisation, have populations containing a much higher proportion of young people and have much higher total fertility rates, as shown in Table 28.1.

Demographic Trends in Country/Income Groups

2. Categories of Food Insecure People:

There are groups of people who are more at risk than others because of lack of sufficient and adequate food. The most acutely vulnerable are pregnant and nursing mothers, unborn babies as well as children under five.


They are in critical periods of their lives where they have special nutritional needs. In South Asia around 99 million children below the age of five are underweight. Another group of food insecure people is those who suffer most from hidden hunger. Due to unbalanced diets, millions of children have vitamin A, iodine and iron deficiencies.

There are about 30 million pregnant women in South Asia suffering from anaemia. Further, there are about 63 million people who are food-insecure in a transitory way. This group consists of poor people exposed to recurrent natural disasters. Their ability to cope with sudden food shortages decreases with every new disaster and makes them even more vulnerable and food insecure.

Food insecurity is a multidimensional problem that affects different types of people in different ways. Tremendous progress has been made to promote food security through increasing food-grains production. But this kind of unidimensional focus on food availability is not enough to solve the problem.

Food Availability:

Food availability is not South Asia’s biggest food security problem. The supply of the most important staple food in this region cereal varies from 130 kg to over 180 kg per person per year. Overall, the total cereal imports by all SAARC countries amount to less than five per cent of the total supply, a level that is considered as being virtually self-sufficient.

This adequacy of production is one of the reasons why at first glance, there appears to be enough food in the SAARC region. However, many studies suggest that South Asia could face increasing food shortfalls during the next decade.

The quantity of food needed to maintain consumption at current level could increase steeply, influenced by factors such as population growth, area available for cultivation and the effect of missing income on dietary consumption.

Food Access:

Despite sizeable cereal production in the SAARC region, major segments of the population continued to be undernourished. Here the problem is not the lack of food, but the inability to buy or access to food. Access has to do primarily with poverty and income levels.

The highest concentration of people below the poverty line is in the north-eastern part of the region including the hills and mountains in Nepal, Bihar and Orissa of India, and Bangladesh. In these areas, lack of cash to purchase food often coincides with limited food availability in the market at certain times of the year.

Food Utilization:

Poor food utilization probably contributes more than any other dimension of food insecurity to the high prevalence of child malnutrition and micro nutrient deficiencies in South Asia. What food is eaten, when and in what quantities, how it is prepared, and who eats first, all vary according to geography, ethnicity and socio-economic status.

In parts of India and Nepal, pregnant women eat less than normal during pregnancy for the fear that normal foetal growth may cause difficulty in child birth. Sometimes, even the consumption of nutritious foods such as milk is restricted due to the belief that this will cause the foetus to get stuck to the mother’s womb. Women’s lack of knowledge about right nutrition and childcare strongly correlates with their educational levels.

Why may a person remain malnourished in a household that has enough food? There are three principal components of food utilization: nutrition practices, physiological absorption and intra-household distribution. Nutrition practices cover dietary pattern, child care and nutrition knowledge and are strongly determined by culture and tradition.

How well the food is absorbed by the body depends on the quality of water and sanitation, health care and food safety. Intra-household distribution has a lot to do with gender specific behaviour or gender discrimination.

Gender differentials often emerge from cultural stereotypes that have been prevalent over centuries. Of course, there are also other factors, such as environmental availability of micro nutrients and poverty that have an influence on the nutritional status of people, but his influence is frequently less pronounced.


Successful promotion of food security for all will require that efforts are not limited to the chronic cases of undernourishment and malnutrition. Tens of millions of people in South Asia reside in areas that are exposed to recurrent disasters.

If floods, droughts or cyclones constantly put in question the survival of the very assets on which the food security of these people depends, little sustained development can be expected. South Asia is particularly vulnerable to natural disasters with a global share of more than 60 per cent of all natural disaster related deaths, as shown in Table 28.2.


3. World Food Problem:

The number of people who need food is increasing. The resources to produce food are dwindling. In 1961 the acreage of cultivated land supporting food production stood at 0.44 hectares per capita. Today it is about 0.26 hectares per person. The bulk of land best suited to rain-fed agriculture is already under cultivation.

In many regions, industrialization is claiming some of the best crop land. In addition, soil erosion by water and wind due to inappropriate agricultural techniques as well as overuse of scarce resources particularly water make efforts to produce sufficient quantities of food even more difficult.

The scale of land degradation is estimated to be very high. The degradation of cropland appears to be most extensive in Africa, affecting 65 percent of the cropland area as compared to 51 percent in Latin America and 38 per cent in Asia.

Vulnerable Population of South Asia

On the global level, major key indicators show that the physical conditions of the earth are deteriorating. The earth is getting warmer and deforestation continues unabated, reducing the capacity of soils and vegetation to absorb and store water.

With continuous population growth, accelerated urbanisation and increased pressure on the society and the environment, the struggle for food security will have to be fought on many fronts. Many experts feel that the task of meeting world food needs by 2010 with the use of existing technology may prove difficult, not only because of the historically unprecedented increments to world population but also because problems of resources degradation and mismanagement.

In 1996, in the Rome Declaration of the World Food Summit, heads of the states of all countries of the world “reaffirmed the right of everyone to have access to safe and nutritious food, consistent with the right to adequate food and the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger”.

Progress towards such a goal in the SAARC countries has generally not been taken up. If the present trends were to continue, over 217 million people in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka would still be hungry in 2015, many more than the target of some 150 million.

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