The essential items in the world for a human being are food, clothing, and shelter. It is also known as basic needs. Since the beginning of human civilization, food security has been a vital tool for people. Food security is when all people have physical and economic access at all times to buy, produce, obtain or consume sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for a healthy and active life. Food insecurity is a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food.
Food security rests on four key pillars:
- Availability: It is mainly the supply or production of food materials. “The amount of food that is present in a country or area through all forms of domestic production, imports, food stocks, and food aid” (WFP. 2009).
- Accessibility: The concept refers to “physical, social, and economic access” (FAO. 1996). It means affordability in which every household member, at all times, has access to enough food for an active, healthy life.
- Utilization: It means the proper consumption of food and nutrition. No access to clean drinking water, poor environment, lack of hygiene, and poor health infrastructure, lead to reduced assimilation of the consumed food.
- Stability: Stability defines the temporal dimension of food and nutrition security, individually the time frame in which food security is being considered. Stability is assumed when the supply of food, income, and economic resources remain constant at a household level during the year and in the long- term.
Food insecurity is no longer seen simply as a failure of agriculture to produce sufficient food at the national level, but instead as a failure of livelihoods to guarantee access to sufficient food at the household level. Analysts generally believe that Africa’s current food emergencies are the result of a combination of problems that range from drought and adverse weather patterns and civil conflict, to political-economic crises, HIV/AIDS, and poor policy decisions. No single factor is uniquely responsible.
Food insecurity is classified into three major categories by the FAO as follows:
- Acute: Severe hunger and malnutrition to the point that lives are in a significant threat immediately (e.g., famine).
- Occasional: It is defined as the existence of food insecurity due to a specific temporary circumstance.
- Chronic: the requirement of food needs is consistently or permanently under threat. Food insecurity is a multi-dimensional concept, and it affects every section of the population in different ways.
Understanding the causes of food insecurity
Food insecurity or lack of access to sufficient food in quantity and quality to meet dietary needs has multiple causes:
- Conflict: Food insecurity can be both a cause and consequence of conflict and political instability. The impact being felt at the household and national levels. The relationship between conflict and food security affects each other as food scarcity leads to market collapse. As a result, food availability in the market decreases, which creates greater havoc in public. Other direct economic outcomes include price changes for basic commodities, destitution, and displacement, disruption of trade and aid flows. Because of persistent conflicts and food insecurity, millions of helpless people are ready to migrate away from their homeland to a better place.
- Climatic shocks: Sudden (floods) or slow-onset climatic shocks (drought) affect the livelihoods of populations, especially agro-pastoralists who highly depend on natural resources. The land is degraded, crops are destroyed, while herds struggle to find drinking water and sufficient pasture. This can lead to conflict among these communities. Besides the economic impact on agro-pastoralist populations, the degradation of crops and livestock can affect populations who rely on locally-grown products or who depend on agricultural employment as their main source of income. Adding to this is the impact that natural disasters can have on productive and market infrastructures: roads, bridges, dams, buildings, irrigation networks, etc. Climate change can also increase different vector-borne diseases which can hamper people’s physiological capacity to get necessary nutrients from the foods consumed and decrease labor productivity due to morbidity (Zewdie, 2014).
- Urbanization: Increasing rural-urban migration due to urbanization plays a key role in the emerging food insecurity. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), by the year 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population is expected to be living in cities. This means the population worldwide will need to produce more food with fewer farmers to meet the growing caloric demands in cities. By this, agricultural production will be disrupted thereby increasing food insecurity.
- Economic shocks: Shocks such as inflation, currency depreciation, loss of jobs, loss of investment, financial speculation, or destabilization of import/export flows cause food insecurity because they lead to decreased purchasing power, reduced availability of commodities, and loss of income. Countries with weak economic institutions (large debts, import dependency) or facing conflicts are particularly vulnerable to these shocks. The populations most affected by these are those employed in the informal sector, with low and unstable incomes and without social protection systems.
- Population growth: The increase in population indirectly affects food security, but the effect of poverty is more than that. The growth of the population exacerbated the pressure on environmental degradation, social causes, and climate change and further these factors pose the food insecurity problem to the state or region.
- HIV/AIDS: The relationship of HIV/AIDS to food security is bi-directional: vulnerability and food insecurity feed into the very risky behavior that drives the HIV/AIDS pandemic; and the impact of HIV/AIDS exacerbates food insecurity, which again feeds into risk. The rapid spread of the epidemic is a reflection of poverty, which does not cause it but certainly aggravates it, and it is in turn driving a ruthless cycle of impoverishment, resulting in a rapid increase in the number of destitute families, reversing decades of development.
- Structural poverty: Food insecurity and hunger are closely related to poverty and an inability to purchase food. Tackling hunger cannot be solved by simply producing more food, famines have occurred even with plenty of food. Most people buy food rather than produce it; very few people, including small farmers, are entirely self-sufficient in production. When disasters strike, the poor and socially disadvantaged suffer the most and are the least equipped to cope with the impact. Most of the populations living in these areas are poor and lack sufficient housing, infrastructure, and services that can mitigate the impact of a disaster. They may also live in flood-prone or geologically unstable areas, or farm marginal lands.