Food security is a term used in development and humanitarian aid. It does not have one agreed definition, and is often used broadly to mean a situation in which people have continuity of food supply, or the methods by which this is achieved.

A commonly used definition is that a community enjoys food security when all people, at all times, have access to nutritious, safe, personally acceptable and culturally appropriate foods, produced in ways that are environmentally sound and socially just.

The term (in a development context) grew out of a reaction to the problems associated with food aid, a development paradigm in which the solution to hunger is seen as being the donation of surplus food commodities by (usually) rich developed nations. The focus of food security interventions is usually the development of indigenous coping mechanism to fight hunger and malnutrition.

Contents

1 World Food Summit 2 Achieving food security 3 See also 4 External link

World Food Summit

The World Food Summit was held in Rome in 1996, the summit was organised renewing global commitment to the fight against hunger. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) called the summit in response to widespread undernutrition and growing concern about the capacity of agriculture to meet future food needs. The conference produced two key documents, the Rome Declaration on World Food Security and the World Food Summit Plan of Action.

The Rome Declaration calls for the members of the United Nations to work to halve the number of chronically undernourished people on the Earth by the year 2015. The Plan of Action sets a number of targets for government and non-governmental organizations for achieving food security, at the individual, household, national, regional and global levels.

Achieving food security

From The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2003 [1] (http://www.fao.org/documents/show_cdr.asp?url_file=/docrep/006/j0083e/j0083e00.htm)

'In general the countries that suceeded in reducing hunger were characterised by more rapid economic growth and specifically more rapid growth in their agricultural sectors. They also exhibited slower population growth, lower levels of HIV and higher ranking int he Human Development Index'.

USAID [2] (http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/agriculture/food_security.htm) proposes several key steps to increasing agricultural productivity which is in turn key to increasing rural income and reducing food insecurity. They include:

• Boosting agricultural science and technology. Rising agricultural productivity drives economic growth.
• Securing property rights and access to finance.
• Enhancing human capital through education and improved health.
• Conflict prevention and resolution mechanisms and democracy and governance based on principles of accountability and transparency in public institutions and the rule of law are basic to reducing vunerable members of society.

See also

• Agriculture
• International development
• Land reform
• 2020 Vision Initiative

External link

The World Food Summit (http://www.fao.org/wfs/index_en.htm)

fr:sécurité alimentaire