Discuss the concept of food security

when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. Due to population increase in some places people are already not getting enough food. Supply and demand also cause problems for the more vulnerable in society, as if prices go up the supply of food should still be affordable for all. National food security is at the smaller scale having enough food available within a country to feed all the people within the country. This can be achieved by sufficiency inside a country to produce enough food for the population, or by generating enough money from exports to buy imported food. Household and individual food security are highly important. Although there is enough food globally this does not meant that an individual has enough to eat. Food secure households need sustainable access to enough food and ways of resisting shocks. Access to food depends on ability to grow, gather or purchase enough food. This can be affected by environmental conditions, availability of work, price of food and the season. Households may have sufficient food to meet immediate needs but their source may not be sustainable due to decreasing land fertility, increasing prices or a dependence on wages from seasonal labour. Households must also have reserves to withstand shocks like a crop failure, death or illness of the wage earner, conflict or deterioration in the world’s economy. An individual can be affected due to gender or age, as even in a food secure household the distribution may be uneven between the members of the family. In some countries the boys are given priority over food so the girls eat less and many poor women go hungry to feed their children. However, food security is only possible for some nations; many regions suffer from food insecurity which exists when people lack access to sufficient amounts of safe and nutritious food, therefore are not consuming enough for an active and healthy life. This may be due to the unavailability of food, inadequate purchasing power or inappropriate utilization at household level. This can be caused by food deficiencies which are caused by a local shortage of food due to physical factors such as a climactic effect on food supplies, problems of transport, storage and relief organisations. This is called food availability deficit (FAD) and there is also another cause which is more common which is called a food entitlement deficit (FED). This is when hunger is found in areas where food is available in supply and in fact increasing in production. When FED is the cause of food insecurity is important to look at the political and economic situation of the community concerned, and also how food is produced distributed and consumed. It also shows that there are barriers to food e.g. rising costs relative to wages. Looking at Amartya Sen’s work in 1981 there are complex causes of food insecurity and famines (etc.) where physical factors can be a catalyst.  The human and natural causes of food insecurity are combined with a vulnerability which leads to food insecurity. Food security and food insecurity are linked as they are two halves of the same problem. Firstly the scale of food security varies greatly spatially whereas food insecurity changes depending on the economic and political situation of the area, it also depends on the vulnerability to effects, both physical and human, in the area.