According to experts, we now live in a time when the world produces enough food to support the

world’s population of nearly 7 billion people. However, between 2010 and 2012, around 870 million
people around the world were still hungry. The traditional answer to this situation, according to
Bartthwal-Datta, is to increase food production; however, increasing food production does not always
contribute to food security. Many factors determine how a community, nation-state, or the entire
world might achieve food security. When used in a global environment, the complexity of achieving
food security grows. Ironically, the more severe and widespread hunger is, the more the concept of
food security is valued by society and their governments. However, considering that food production
resources are finite and strongly reliant on a lively and sustainable environment, the concern is how
food production will cope with the rapid growth in population.
FOOD SECURITY
“Food security occurs when all people have physical and economic access to enough, safe, and
nutritious food to suit their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life at all
times”. -World Food Summit, 1996
Food security refers to the ability of those who raise, catch, produce, process, transport, retail, and
serve our food to earn a fair living income. Human security and food security are inextricably linked.
Food security is considered a non-traditional security issue which is vital, like any other, to the
survival and stability of any nation-state (FAO Food Security_百度文库., 2014).

Food Security has four dimensions: Economic and Physical Access to Food, Physical Availability of
Food, Stability of the Other Three Dimensions Over Time, and Food Utilization.

1. Physical Availability of Food refers to the physical existence of food. A nation-state must
ensure local or domestic food production, commercially import and export food, food aid and
domestic food stocks. Availability of food at the household could be from own production or
purchased from the market.
2. Economic and Physical Access to Food refers to a sufficient supply of food at the national or
international level; nevertheless, this does not guarantee food securtity at the home level.
Concerns about limited food access have prompted policymakers to place a greater
emphasis on incomes, expenditures, markets, and pricing in order to achieve food security
goals.
3. The process by which the body utilizes various nutrients is known as Food Utilization.
Individuals with sufficient energy and nutritional intake are the consequence of adequate
care and feeding practices, food preparation, dietary diversity, and food distribution
throughout the home (Khazanah Research Institute, 2015). This, when combined with good
biological utilization of the food consumed, establishes an individual’s nutritional state (Essay
on Food Utilization, n.d.).
4. Stability of Other Three Dimensions refers to having a regular or consistent access to food
on a regular basis in order to maintain one’s nutritional status. Weather extremes, political
unrest, and economic variables such as unemployment and increased food prices can all
have an impact on your food security.
IMPORTANCE OF FOOD SECURITY
The United States Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture claims that
availability to high-quality, nutrient-dense food is essential to human survival. It goes on to say that
secure food availability has a wide range of good consequences, including enhanced economic
growth, poverty reduction, trade opportunities, global security and stability, and improved health and
healthcare. Food security brings about economic growth because well-fed and properly nourished
populations have advanced levels of human capital development, which serve as a source of
workforce for a thriving economy. Further, high levels of malnutrition and illnesses due to poor food
choices or lack thereof divert significant government funds for healthcare to other vital social
services for societal development. Malnutrition creates a generation of less functional and
illness-prone people, which may require sustained medical attention draining both private and public
funds to do so.
In the same vein, food security reduces poverty since it allows families to invest their funds for needs
that lead to their development. Instead of spending their income on hospitalization due to illnesses
brought about by hunger or malnutrition, a family could spend it for the education of their children,
giving them better chances in the future.
Food security is also crucial in creating trade opportunities. As countries and their local communities
can produce enough food to ensure food security, excess supply can be traded for food supply that
is not locally grown or exported to other countries for added income and augment the food
sufficiency of that country.
Increased global security and stability is attained when there is food security. When a locality or
country can provide for the needs, among them food and water, there is less likelihood that they will
revolt against their rulers due to discontent, which could potentially and massive deprivation. It also
prevents the possibility of massive migration due to famine or conflict arising from discontent, which
could potentially strain the limited resources of their destination countries and lead to further conflicts
with the latter's local population.
Food security is also responsible for the improved health and healthcare of people. Available and
sufficient supply of nutritious food prevents malnutrition and diseases, thereby lessening the
likelihood of developing diseases that can strain public and personal funds for hospitalization and
medical costs. When a family cannot afford to buy healthy and nutritious food to provide for its
members, chronic diseases are common.
Experts argue that food security is a difficult concept to measure. However, one can argue that the
inability to attain all the dimensions of food security can lead to food insecurity. FAO defines food
insecurity as when people lack secure access to sufficient safe and nutritious food for average
growth and development and active and healthy life. According to the Utah State University Hunger
Solutions Institute, hunger and food insecurity are two different concepts related to each other. Food
insecurity refers to the inability to obtain acceptable food in socially acceptable manners due to a
lack of or uncertainty in one’s liability to obtain it (Lee, 2017). Hunger, on the other hand, refers to the
restless or painful sensation that results from a lack of nourishment. Malnutrition can also develop
over time as a result of repeated and involuntary lack of food access (Ohio Association of Second
Harvest Foodbanks, n.d.).
EFFECTS OF FOOD INSECURITY
Food insecurity has developmental severe, economic, social and medical impacts on individuals,
families, communities and countries. The unavailability of nutritious food to millions of people
adversely affects individuals and groups of people in various ways, namely:
1. Malnutrition and Economic Instability = According to the World Health Organization, it
refers to deficiencies, excesses, or imbalances in a person's energy and nutrients intake. In
the Philippines, the cost of early childhood malnutrition is around P328 billion or 2.8% of the
GDP. In addition, the adverse effects of malnutrition extended to a population's reduced
human capital formation, excess mortality, additional health burden and added educations
cost, which could push the cost of malnutrition in the Philippines to 4.4% of the GDP.
 2. Social Upheavals = When a country has a high prevalence of food insecurity, it also tends
to experience social unrest and upheavals. Mass demonstrations of dissatisfaction with the
sitting government can cause economic and political instability, even deteriorate into a
full-scale armed conflict with cross-border consequences.
3. Mass Migration and Displacement = Food insecurity or starvation resulting from
long-standing conflict can lead to massive and forced migratory movements of people. This,
in turn, can lead to potential conflict in their destination countries as the needs of refugees or
migrants can strain the latter's resources and food supply. It can also pose risks to the
sovereignty of destination states. Criminal and suspicious elements such as terrorists and
saboteurs can pose as refugees, infiltrate and compromise the host country's security.
10 CHALLENGES OF GLOBAL FOOD SECURITY
Food security occurs when all people can access enough safe and nutritious food to meet their
requirements for a healthy life in ways the planet can sustain itself into the future. However, food
security faces several challenges across production and consumption, which research will be
essential to solving this predicament. (Coursehero, n.d.).
1. Rising population = There will be 219,000 people at the dinner table tonight who were not
there last night, many of them with empty plates.
2. Rising incomes, changing diets = Today, with incomes rising fast in emerging economies,
at least 3 billion people are moving up the food chain toward Westernized diets. They
consume more grain-intensive livestock and poultry products. Today, the growth in world
grain consumption is concentrated in China. It adds over 8 million people per year, but the
big driver is the rising affluence of its nearly 1.4 billion people. As incomes go up, people
tend to eat more meat. China’s meat consumption per person is still only half that of the
United States. That leaves a huge potential for future demand growth.
3. It is falling water tables = In India, some 190 million people are being fed with grain
produced by overpumping groundwater. For China, the number is 130 million. Aquifer
depletion now threatens harvests in the big three grain producers — China, India and the
United States—that together produce half of the world's grain.
4. More foodless days = In Nigeria, 27% of families experience foodless days. In India, it is
24%; in Peru, 14%. The world is in transition from an era dominated by surpluses to one
defined by scarcity. On some days, not eating is how the worlds' poorest are coping with the
doubling of world grain prices since 2006. But even as we face new constraints on future
production, the world population is growing by 80 million people each year.
5. Slowing irrigation = Water supply is now the principal constraint on efforts to expand world
food production. During the last half of the 20th century, the world’s irrigated area expanded
from 250 million acres in 1950 to roughly 700 million in 2000. This near tripling of world
irrigation within 50 years was historically unique. Since then, the growth in irrigation has
come to a near standstill, expanding only 10% between 2000 and 2010.
6. Increasing soil erosion = Nearly a third of the world’s cropland is losing topsoil faster than
new soil is forming. This reduces the land’s inherent fertility. Future food production is also
threatened by soil erosion. The thin layer of topsoil that covers the earth's land surface was
formed over long stretches of geological time as new soil formation exceeded the natural
erosion rate.
7. Climate change = The generation of farmers now on the land is the first to face artificial
climate change. Agriculture as it exists today developed over 11,000 years of relatively
 remarkable climate stability. It has evolved to maximize production within that climate
system. Now, suddenly, the climate is changing.
8. Melting water reserves = At no time since agriculture began has the world faced such a
predictably massive threat to food production as that posed by the melting mountain glaciers
of Asia. Mountain glaciers are melting in the Andes, the Rocky Mountains, the Alps and
elsewhere. But nowhere does melting threaten world food security more than in the glaciers
of the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau that feeds the major rivers of India and China.
9. Flattening yields = After several decades of rising grain yields, farmers in the more
agriculturally advanced countries have recently hit a glass ceiling. The limits of
photosynthesis itself impose that production ceiling. In Japan, the longtime leader in raising
cropland productivity, the rise in the yield of rice that began in the 1880s essentially came to
a halt in 1996. Having maximized productivity, farmers ran into the inherent limits of
photosynthesis and could no longer increase the amount they could harvest from a given
plot. In China, rice yields are now just 4% below Japan’s. Unless China can raise its yields
above those in Japan, which seems unlikely, it, too, is facing a plateauing of rice yields. Corn
yields in the United States, which accounts for nearly 40% of the world corn harvest, are
starting to level off. Yields in some other corn-growing countries such as Argentina, France
and Italy also appear to be stagnating.
10. Little time to prepare = To state the obvious, we are in a situation both difficult and
dangerous. The world today desperately needs leadership on the food security issue. Any
further progress requires a total restructuring of the energy economy.
● (Brown, 2013)
MODELS OF GLOBAL FOOD SECURITY
● The key aspects of the Food Security Conceptual Model include an understanding of:
1. Assets for a living (human, financial, physical, natural, and social capital)
2. Livelihood strategies (food or income sources, expenditures, coping mechanisms)
3. Various scales of study are used, including macro, meso, and intra-household dynamics
4. Integrated sectoral analysis
5. Resistance
6. Proximate to underlying causes
7. Risk management
8. Resilience
Other Food Security Models (found online)