Food Insecurity Is A Serious Global Problem

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.

Food insecurity is defined as “the lack of access to enough food to ensure adequate nutrition.”1 The Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service (ERS) reported that 14.6% of US households were food insecure during at least some portion of 2008 (up 11.1% from 2007), the highest levels recorded since monitoring began in 1995.2 Food insecurity is a concern of under consumption and obesity is a disease of over consumption, yet both outcomes may coexist, seemingly incongruously, within the same household.2 The most popular explanation is that low-cost, energy-dense foods linked to obesity are favored by financially constrained households, who are the most likely to be food insecure.2 Another theory, focusing on environmental context net of individual circumstance, argues that obesity and insecurity are both symptoms of malnutrition, occurring in neighborhoods where nutritious foods are unavailable or unaffordable.2 A separate literature researches environmental roles in poor nutritional outcomes, recent studies link obesity as well as atherosclerosis and diabetes to the food environment, the local context of available food items.2 The theory is that local inaccessibility to healthy foods influences diet composition, a claim supported by evidence.2 Especially in poorer neighborhoods, food options are often limited to fast food restaurants, convenience stores, or grocery stores more poorly stocked both in

This essay is a review of the article “Growing More Food with Less Water”, written by Sandra Postel. According the article, our global freshwater sources, including underground aquifers and rivers are stressed beyond their ability to provide freshwater. Agriculture redesign is necessary with the two primary goals being to cut water demands of mainstream agriculture and bring low cost irrigation to poor farmers. Typical irrigation, crop furrow flooding is a main cause of wasted and polluted water. This article discusses alternatives to typical irrigation. These alternatives have been tested onsite by farers and surveyed.

Even though payments from Social Security and Supplemental Security Income have played a critical part in an attempt to increase economic security among older adults, poverty still remains on the rise for this population. Many still live on limited incomes and have the modest savings. In 2013, 50% of people in Medicare possessed incomes of less than $23,000 which corresponds to 200% of poverty in 2015 (Cubanski et. al, 2015). Today, over 25 million people ages 60 or more are economically insecure living at or below 250% of the federal poverty level (FPL) (National Council on Aging, 2016). As a result, these individuals struggle with increasing housing and health care bills, lack of nutrition, inadequate access to transportation, and job

Attention getter 46 million live in poverty in the United States. That is close to the population of California, Indiana, and Rhode Island combined. Three states living in poverty that is not good at all. Hunger, Poverty, and food insecurity is a rapidly growing problem in the U.S.

Hunger stalks America and many other countries. How the world deals with hunger is dependent on cultural attitudes and the understanding of what hunger means to the individual and communities. In the United States, the majority of hungry people are the elderly, children, and the disabled which represent a bloc of people unable to provide for themselves with employment. The understanding that governmental systems and institutions responsible for food insecurity are failing, is becoming mainstream in the population, not the previous idea that agriculture does not produce enough food. How to provide physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to meet dietary needs and food preferences for healthy lives is a problem of political and economic exclusion, social injustice and discrimination (Cunningham 2017, Lecture 1). The right to food security should be an uncompromised right of humanity, no matter the cost to government or agriculture.

Food is a necessary part of ever individual’s daily life. Without food, the body cannot function properly, resulting in poor health, exhaustion, and even death by starvation. Therefore, food insecurity continues to be an international global epidemic. The journal article by Harrigan suggests that the citizens of the Sub-Saharan African country of Malawia are in further poverty due to their lack of food and agricultural resources. The newspaper article from the Guardian tells the real life story of African citizens struggling to farm and find food due to the crop shortages that have spanned Africa for the past two years. This is a current global issue, and the journal and news article prove that there is much to be done in order to help restore

Food insecurity is a fact for millions of American every day in our country. Children, adults, and the elderly of all races, living in poverty or in lower middle class families, are at a higher risk of not having enough to eat. The United States, in 2012, used roughly 40% or 915 million acres of all US land as farmland (USDA 2014, 1), yet as a nation we cannot feed all of our people. The American government subsidizes commodity crops, such as corn, wheat, and soy more than any other type of crop in the United States, (This does not include the subsidies directly paid to the meat and dairy industry, which is a whole other paper!). Government subsidies are less common for the production of fresh fruits and vegetables. Government subsidies encourage farmers to grow commodity crops instead of growing fruits and vegetables for consumers at competitive prices creating food insecurity. The cheap production of commodity crops force families in the lower middle class and poverty to choose a diet of processed food, which are less nutritious than fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole grains causing many of the health problems that we see in the population today.

According to the Household Food Security in the US in 2013, some people experience food insecurity. Food insecurity is the access to adequate food is limited by money or other resources. Obesity is one of the top health problem in America and this is due to eating habits. Junk food is what people can afford. While eating junk food people are consuming more calories. According to the article “Fast Food Linked to Child Obesity” by Jaime Holguin about one third of children aged 4 to 19 eat fast food. This will lead to an increase in weight and obesity.

In recent years overconsumption of water has drained the earth’s river basins faster than rain can replenish them. An average person’s daily water footprint i.e. the total amount of water consumed to support their lifestyle is 3,800 liters. Most of this consumption relates to the crops that are farmed to provide us with food and clothing. Irrigation consumes an enormous amount of water, and the effects of this are seen at every stage in the food chain. For example 98 percent of the water footprint created by raising beef cattle comes from growing the grain that feeds the cows during their lifetimes. For each kilogram of steak produced, we consume 15,415 liters of water. That’s enough drinking water to last one person nearly 17 years. Growing water footprint is partly a result of our increasing population; but it is also compounded by the fact that irrigation systems, especially in the developing world, are often extremely inefficient. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization states that even a good irrigation scheme is only 50-60 percent efficient. Poor irrigation systems can result in the vast majority of the water being lost to evaporation, seepage and other problems before it reaches the fields. Moreover, once it gets there, if farmers choose to irrigate at the wrong time for example, just before it rains, the water will be wasted and the crops may even be damaged.

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

We usually associate water shortages with a lack of drinking water, but global water scarcity has a critical impact on food security. Agriculture consumes more water than any other source. Climate change is altering patterns of weather around the world, causing shortages and droughts in some areas and floods in others. Water is key to food security. Crops and livestock need water to grow. Agriculture requires large quantities of water for irrigation and various production processes. Water scarcity may limit food production and supply, putting pressure on food prices and increasing countries’ dependence on food imports

Food security is often defined as the state of having access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food. To ensure that all humans are food secure and do not face the scourge of hunger, the world has set for itself an ambitious target of zero hunger by the year 2030 , as part of the sustainable development goals. Much progress has been made to increase food production and yields to meet the growing food demands, however challenges exist that are occasioned by conflict in developing countries, climate change and volatile food prices. There is however need to strengthen food systems and supply chains to reduce inefficiencies and better respond to shocks.

Coxe has studied the sector for more than 35 years as a strategist for BMO Financial Group. He says it didn’t have to come to this. “We’ve got a situation where there has been no incentive to allocate significant new capital to agriculture or to develop new technologies to dramatically expand crop output.”

It is an essential resource for sustaining life as well as central to agriculture and rural development, and is intrinsically linked to global challenges of food insecurity and poverty, climate change adaptation and mitigation, as well as degradation and depletion of natural resources that affect the livelihoods of millions of people across the world. According to the World Bank, (2010) report, water is a scarce resource with multiple interwoven uses that range from drinking water, energy, irrigation, manufacturing things, transport of people and goods among others. The report further states that, more than one-sixth of the Worlds’ population does not have access to safe drinking water, with 80% living in rural areas thus access to water cannot not be guaranteed globally.