The Global Food Security Crisis

In 2008 the United Nations declared a global food security crisis, but what exactly is food security? According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, food security “exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (FAO 2011). Based on the definition of food security, food insecurity is then defined as “a situation that exists when people lack secure access to sufficient amounts of safe and nutritious food for normal growth and development, and an active and healthy life” (FAO 2011). Food security and hunger are interrelated, but while there are around 852 million people hungry worldwide due to extreme poverty, up to 2 billion lack food security due to varying degrees of poverty. In this paper I will explore the global food security crisis in more depth, and also how food insecurity infringes on many other human rights, who is being affected by it, what is causing it, and what is being and can be done about it. We can not look at food security more closely without first looking at hunger. The FAO measures hunger as the number of people who do not consume the daily energy requirement. Food security however is determined by looking at a combination of three elements: food availability, food access, and food utilization (WFP 2011). Food availability means that food must be available in sufficient quantities and on a consistent basis, food access means that people must be able to regularly acquire adequate quantities of food through purchase, home production, barter, gifts, borrowing, or food aid, and food utilization means that consumed food must have a positive nutritional impact on people (WFP 2011). Once these areas are analyzed the IPC, or integrated food security phase classification, classifies the food security situation according to five levels, called phases, which

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