Food Insecurity In The Food System

This report will explore the impacts, causes and solutions of food insecurity and other contextual factors relating to Chad’s economic and financial crisis.

The world we live in today is growing at an extremely fast pace. It seems to be that everyday there are more buildings being built, more concrete being poured, and more free land being destroyed. The cause of these events is the worlds’ population rate. Every day our population reaches an all-time high, every day we gain more mouths to feed, and every day we are losing ways to feed these mouths. Food insecurity has risen significantly along with the rise of our population. We must find ways to lower the food insecurity rate by finding new farming practices, making the public more aware of this issue, and doing more ourselves to make sure that we make a change to this problem.

Did you know in 2014, 48.1 million households in the United States were food insecure? (Feeding America, 2016) Additionally, household with children reported higher rates of food insecurity compared to households without children. According to new research, a great proportion of college students are suffering from food insecurity (Hughes et al., 2011; Patton-Lopez et al., 2014). According to the United States Department of Agriculture, food insecurity is defined by “the state of being without reliable access to sufficient quantity of affordable nutritious food” (2015). Since 2006, the USDA introduced new terms to categorize food insecurity ranges. Marginal food security is described as “anxiety over food sufficiency or shortage of food in the house. Little or no change in diet” (Gaines et al., n.d.). Low food security “reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet without reduced food intake. Very low food security “disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.”

A food desert can be defined as an urban area where the residents must travel more than one mile to have access to affordable fresh fruits and vegetables (USDA, 2015). Food insecurity is defined as insufficient quantities of food available or on an consistent basis, lack of resources to obtain appropriate foods, and suitable knowledge of basic nutrition, as well as water and sanitation (WHO, 2016) What this means is that if a person has access to nutritious foods for an adequate diet, but lacks the proper knowledge to use those foods in a healthy or nutritious way, then that person has a degree of food insecurity. When a person lacks all three components (access, resources, knowledge), they are said to be severely food insecure.

As the Earth’s population grows at breakneck pace over the next several decades, who will feed the world’s people? Agriculture has undergone an extensive expansion and transformation throughout the last few centuries, beginning with the Industrial Revolution of the late 1700s. New technology allowed for better and greater methods of production. With the development of modern technology, people try to think some way can plant less, get more. Many farmers plant only one crop in the same place year after year. However, those against monocropping claim that it is very hard on the environment and actually less profitable than organic means of farming (“Monoculture Crops – Learn About The Effects Of Monocropping”). In addition, the destructive nature of agriculture has recently shown its hand. While our supermarkets, convenience stores, and restaurants are filled with abundant food options, people forget to ask themselves where all this food comes from. Globalization has opened up economies of scale and has allowed people to tap into different types of products, whether that is food or clothing. But the availability of an increased mass market comes at a cost. However, today, the modern farming techniques have grown into a headache for farmers and governments alike, because they are the consequences of overproduction, industrial waste and other problems arising from the modern methods of agriculture. Thus, modern techniques are harmful to environments, animals, and humans.

Food insecurity is a term that indicates the limited capability to afford nutritionally adequate and safe food or the limited ability to obtain adequate foods in socially acceptable ways (1-2). In 2015, 13% of all U.S. households, which represents 42.2 million people (including 29.1 million adults and 13.1 million children), were food insecure (3) and food insecurity was found to be present in every county in the United States, ranging from a low of 4% in Loudoun County, VA to a high of 38% in Jefferson County, MS (4).

With the modernization of the United States over the last decades, companies are manufacturing food rather than farming. Industrial farming, also known as factory farming, is an abusive and inhumane way of raising animals. The amount of food these farm factories are mass-producing is not the issue, instead, the quality of food needs to improve. The nation contains over hundreds of millions of people that need to be fed, the right way. The government needs to make sure the nation’s health is not at risk and properly manage the way food is made.

Food insecurity is happening to many countries, very rapidly. Food insecurity is the state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious, healthy food. My chosen country is the Central African Republic. The Central African Republic (C.A.R.) is a land surrounded by remote land in Central Africa.

Everyone should be able to have the right to access food and it doesn’t matter if you are poor or rich. America want to be a better country but yet limits the access to fresh produce to the people.

Food insecurity is defined as “limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways.”1 Food insecurity data found that in America, 12.7% of households were food insecure at some point and 5% of households had very low food security in 2015.2 The prevalence of food insecurity in Ohio was greater than the national average in 2015, with 16.1% of households reporting food insecurity.2

The United States is thought of as a nation of innovation but the food production in this country is outdated and unimaginative. Industrial farming is used in all aspects of food production with little variation, it is thought to be the most effective farming method but infact it is far from that. The current method of farming involves massive amount of fertilizers and pesticides. A large majority of farmers use an ineffective method farming called monocropping. Monocropping decreases biodiversity and increase the need for fertilizers, in addition to that monocropping increases water waste. The current farming method is causing huge environmental problems as well as health problems. There is no reason for the continued use of such an archaic

The way that Modern Agriculture produces our food involves our health because many of the things we eat. Chicken, meats, vegetables and fruits all contain GMOs and other substances that may be bad for us. In the past years food con-tamination has increased, causing illnesses and even deaths. Most of the food that is found in markets as well as in fast food restaurants contain lots of calories and lots of unhealthy ingredi-ents, for example, corn, high fructose, corn syrup, sugar and so on. However, the Big Agriculture hides these ingredients from us from using headlines like "healthy, nutritional, no artificial flavors and whole grains" to name a few, to persuade us on buying these

Food Insecurity is defined as access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life, and at a minimum includes the following: the ready availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods and the assured ability to acquire personally acceptable foods in a socially acceptable way, qualified by their involuntariness and periodicity. Even though food insecurity affects everyone in the household, it may also affect them differently. Food insecurity mostly exists whenever food security is limited. Uncertain or limited availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods results chronic diseases psychological, and suicidal syndrome (Cook & Frank, 2008)

Food insecurity can be defined as the inability to acquire an adequate quality or sufficient quantity of food in socially acceptable ways or the uncertainty that one will be able to do so. One in six Americans are food insecure. There are five components of food security, including quantity, quality, suitability, psychological, and social factors. Food insecurity can occur for a variety of reasons, the main one being poverty. Decreasing the amount of food wasted has the ability to feed millions of these Americans.

The law of supply and demand offers an economic model that allows the market to set prices for goods. Within a competitive market, consumers can dictate the price and a company’s willingness to produce a product for that matter by their spending habits or their demand. If a large enough portion of consumers were to stop buying a product for example, this could ultimately run it out of the market. This is important to understand because this could provide an important tool to helping in the efforts for sustainability. Shifts in consumer trends within the global food market could pressure producers to alter their practices of land degradation in the effort to stay in existence. This could be applied to challenges beyond just land degradation as effective ways to create change in dietary trends can allow us to pressure any producer of environmental harm to change its ways.