3 Food Security

Food security The concept of food security has echoed time and again at different fora be it global, regional, national, provincial or even household and individual. It aims to removing the imbalance between the demand and supply of food. The concept involves the linkage between population growth and food production and the need to evolve measures to satisfy the ever-growing food needs. FAO(1983) had formulated that the basic concept of food security implied that “all people at all times have both physical and economic access to basic food’ or it means people of a nation have access to sufficient food both in quantity and quality to meet their nutritional requirements. Nutrition is an important aspect of food security, as productivity is directly related to health of the people. At the all India level, 1.9 per cent household suffer from hunger (NSSO data). Malnutrition, as measured by under weight children below three years is estimated at 45.9 per cent as per National Family Health Survey 2006-06. Food security has emerged as a major world concern. It is extremely important that the world as a whole as well as each nation grows enough food to sustain the needs of the rising population; the adverse effects of climatic change are being felt on agriculture production. With the rise in oil prices, costs of inputs such as fertilisers are also rising. In countries like India a significant proportion of the population still lives in the rural areas their standard of living depends on the improvements in the productivity of agriculture. The technology led developments in India successfully ushered in the Green revolution and provided much needed self-reliant food security. However, the continuous growth of our population; gradual depletion and degradation of natural resources; diversion of land and water to non-agricultural uses; production of bio-fuels from grains; emergence of second generation problems; market fluctuations; changing agricultural trade regime; farmers’ income etc. have once again brought concerns of agricultura l sustainability to the centre stage. There is a need for deliberations on several important facets of sustainability associated with food security including sustainability of agriculture, that of resources for food security, that of value addition in agriculture with additional dimensions of bio-diversity and emerging bio-fuels development possibilities, possibilities opened by bio-technology both in food and cash crops especially in the context progressively declaiming area for cultivation in the face of urbanisation and eventual integration of Indian agriculture with global economy. We need further breakthroughs to achieve significant rises in agricultural production and productivity against the backdrop of India has to feed one-sixth or 1.1 billion of the world’s population with only two per cent of the world’s land area. Global Scenario The compounding effect of higher food and fuel prices together with the global recession has had a dramatic impact on the developing world. In 2010 the United Nations has estimated that one sixth of humanity, or over one billion people in developing countries having inadequate access to food. This is an increase of almost 150 million in just four years. There are also grave fears that this crisis in food security could reverse the valuable gains made in overcoming poverty in the last decade and stifle progress towards achieving the Mil lennium Development Goals. Samir E:\12fyp\docs\Food Security.doc

3 Food Security

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