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Running Head: Food Security

Food Security

Name

Year

Affiliation
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Food Security

Introduction

Food security is a continuous worldwide challenge to facilitate everyone’s accessibility to

adequate quantities of affordable and nutritious food supply, subject to both qualitative and

quantitative recommendations (Capone et al. 2014). There are four factors to which food security

relies on, these include food use, food stability, and food access. Food availability can be

described as the availability of food supplies insufficient amount and can be impacted by

distribution, exchange, and production. Food access can be described as appropriate methods of

obtaining a sufficient amount of food, impacted by allocation, preference, and allocation. Food

utilization can be described as proper food consumption in terms of care and knowledge about

nutrition and can be impacted by social value, nutritional value and food safety (Food and

Agriculture Organization of United Nations 2013). The stability of the former components is the

final stage that ensures consistency in the entire system of food.

Noticeable food security challenges

In existence, there are three major obstacles that make it difficult to achieve food

security. However, the aspect with the strongest influence on agricultural production and goes

hand in hand with the availability of food is the environmental aspect.

Environmental considerations

As a basic source for producing food, the land is closely associated with agricultural

productivity. When there is fierce competition amongst land users, urbanization, industrialization

as well as the scales of energy sectors, the largest size of the land is devoted to a new trend of

urbanization, economic development, and industrial development. In addition to developmental

pressure, land degradation can lead to the lessening of the available agricultural use of the
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available land. Previously, inappropriate measures in production and irrigation lead to three

forms of degradation, which include depletion of soil Fertility, soil salinization, and soil erosion.

As a result, approximately 950 million hectares of land has now become semi-arid or arid, this

represents 33% of the total potential agricultural land.

Economic considerations

In terms of approaches that have been assumed by the United States department of

agriculture, in different countries, the food gap can be measured by distribution gaps. This puts

into consideration calorie intake with different income levels within the same country so that it is

possible to approximate the population which is unable to reach the recommended nutritional

needs for purpose of measuring the population that is unable to meet the nutritional intake

through indicative levels of consumption.

Social considerations

Despite the fact that pressure from the agricultural sectors includes little existence of

arable land, interactions with limited resources, and climate change, there is a social challenge

generated both in developed and developing countries depending on its severity and prevalence

maids the worst-hit populations. Due to Poverty, limited or no access to food increases the

vulnerability of developing countries to food insecurity. The resulting situation is that Poverty

alleviation and food security are the two impacts that are routinely inseparable. Apart from

Africa, there are great strides that have been made by the rest of the world towards the

combination of issues. Particularly, sub-Saharan African is still lagging behind and unless

actions are taken, there is a high risk of the situation worsening. By 2050, the global population

is expected to reach 9.6 billion. The population will expand dramatically in both Africa and Asia,
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which are the two main regions considered to be vulnerable to food insecurity. The initial aspect

of population explosions is there is the need for urbanization to provide support for the

overgrowing population. It is estimated that 60 percent of the global population is expected to

maintain a living in urbanized areas by 2035. In order to manage the ever-expanding urban areas,

the pressure on the available arable land and sustain the environment, the question of the

available level of food available will have to be asked. Birth rate per capita in Sub Saharan

Africa is exceedingly high and is twice higher compared to the global average; almost 40 percent

of the national population is less than 15 years old and has not reached the age of producing

newer generations.

Recommended strategies

Through building an initiative known as World Food preservation center, it can be

possible to achieve a global strategy against food insecurity, for purposes of minimizing food

loss during processes of food production in developing countries. The main duty of this initiative

is to draw knowledge from worldwide modern postharvest techniques of preserving food and

sustainable food production technologies and to conduct research on adaptability or

technological research/ innovation, which will help accommodate such technologies in

developing countries (Beddington, 2012). Since smallholder farmers constitute the majority of

those who suffer from food insecurity in developing countries, increasing food production will

help generate an expressive and instantaneous advantage to enhance their livelihoods.

In order to make this possible, one of the first steps could be the introduction of a website

that can serve as a virtual organization linked to some consultants, with expertise in food

conservation. There are several features that can be offered by this platform, and it lays a solid

foundation prior to the existence of the physical one, the same platform can also offer a virtual
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library on particular fields by maintaining practice resources and also updating the newest

reports; the platform can also serve as a center for online learning, offering education programs

and courses on food preservation and sustainable food production; the platform can also serve as

means of communication were experiences and problem solving ideas could be shared, and can

serve as a research center that can facilitate the development of accustomed technologies to

facilitate crop growing process in developing countries and able can meet the national standards

of food.

In the 1970s, the whole world experienced depression in grain production; the overall

quantity was estimated to be at its lowest. Consequently, international food is only capable of

keeping adequate food from donors. There are many difficulties with the current organization,

which stems from the fact that the food aid program has to keep going. Initially, the main

element of success was effective allocation of resources, however recent reports have indicated

that effective allocation of food aid has not actually resulted in the expected outcomes in terms of

satisfying the requirements.

India, which is among developing countries, has managed to achieve a significant

milestone in this area. According to the records of the World Bank, the system of crop

intensification was employed by 0.35 million farmers and exceeded 50,000 hectares of land

(Abraham et al,2014). This has resulted in increased food production, and the final results

indicated a 50 percent increment for oilseeds, 72 percent more of wheat 20 percent in vegetables

and an additional 56 percent pulses.

Conclusion

It is hard to maintain food security in low income developing countries unless developed

nations intervene on issues regarding challenges on less favorable cropland, poverty, expanding

the population and more population base. It is required that more emphasis be put on

international approaches at the beginning, however, there is a need for developing countries to

learn both advanced and basic technology from developed nations and customize them in ways

that can match their own needs.

References

Capone, R. et al. (2014). Food system sustainability and food security: connecting the

dots. Journal of Food Security, Vol. 2, No. 1, 13-22. doi:10.12691/jfs-2-1-2

Abraham B. et al. (2014). The system of crop intensification: reports from the field on

improving agricultural production, food security, and resilience to climate change for multiple

crops.griculture& Food Security, 3:4

Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations (2013), (1). The state of food

and agriculture. Retrieved from: http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3301e/i3301e.pdf

Beddington, J. R. et al. (2012). The role for scientists in tackling food insecurity and

climate change. Agriculture & Food Security, 1:10 Retrieved from:

http://www.agricultureandfoodsecurity.com/content/1/1/10