The Cause And Effects Of Food Insecurity In Africa

Environmental factors are a factor that affect living and nonliving organisms and have participated in Ethiopia’s problem in food deficiency and food insecurity. A large environmental factor that can affect food deficiency and food insecurity is natural hazards and disasters. These can include droughts and floods which can upset agricultural production. For example, grain production and stocks are very low and droughts have hit harvests in grain-producing areas around the world. A more specific example for Ethiopia is that because of Ethiopia’s seasonal rainfall from mid-June to mid-September, soil erosion and

Schmeer, K. K., & Piperata, B. A. (2017). Household food insecurity and child health. Maternal

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.

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

The issue of hunger in africa has caused major chaos around the world. The fact that families and children are left to die because there is insufficient food; therefore, families are separated and left to suffer. For example, on page 1 of “Why Africa Is Still Starving”, by Alex Perry, it states that, “From January to May, the fields were parched and brown. And one failed harvest is enough to turn Ethiopia, a nation of 66 million farmers, a humanitarian catastrophe”. Alex Perry explains how the soil of Africa is not rich enough to grow any goods or rich crops.

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

Focusing on a specific place gives us the opportunity to try and find a solution that will be feasible enough to try to end world hunger. So we decided to focus on the Central African Republic because it is the hungriest of all countries. Over the last three years the country has been caught in the worst political and humanitarian crisis of it’s history. According to Africa Hunger and Poverty Fact, as of May 2014 more than 600,000 people have been internally displaced and 1.6 million people are classified as food insecure. In 2014, sixty percent of households reported having exhausted their food stocks by December 2013, and ninety percent said they consumed just one meal a day. Africa faces serious environmental

World Food Summit defines food security as: “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”. (World Food Summit, 1996) On the contrary, the food insecurity means the situation people who are lack of food or nutrition. A person who lives in such situation for a very long time cannot access enough nutritious food to be healthy. Additionally, food insecurity can be chronic, seasonal or transitory (FAO, 2000). At present, the

population, however, one in nine are food insecure. Food security, defined by the United Nations’ Committee on World Food Security is “the condition in which all people, at all times, have physical, economic and social access to sufficient safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs for an active and healthy life.” Developing countries are most at risk of food insecurity with Sub-Saharan Africa having the highest prevalence of hunger.

Food security is to have availability to food, whether it be for basic nutritional needs, special dietary needs, for example, lactose-free, or personal preferences. For a household to be considered food secure, the tenants must not be living in hunger.  In recent years land degradation, climate change, global water crisis, and greedy land deals, are the main causes of food insecurity.  From a global report in 2006, there are more overweight people (over one billion) than undernourished people (an estimated 800 million).  There are up to 2 billion people in the world, that have a shortage of food security due to several levels of poverty.  The population increases and people desire new and different foods, even though there is already enough, however, this cannot happen because the requirements needed to do this are not available. This leads to challenges in the world, such as accommodating the growing population with food at all times.

18 hours have raised more questions than I could have imagined possible. Those 18 hours have initiated a process of questioning (inwardly and externally) the inequality regimes inherent in our society that are directly affecting hunger within our borders. My time volunteering at the Jewish Family Services and from previous experience with a community gleaning project from high school, I have been able to identify major components that decrease food access, food utilization, and food accessibility, yet increase levels of hunger and command the health of not only them, but our entire society. Demographics are considerably the number one element that has allowed me to explore and decompose the injustices of lack of nutrition in a first world country and which would be explore on the global scale as well considering that out of the “6.8 billion people, 5 billino are living at levels of poverty that deprive them of their basic needs, and more than 1 billion are going hungry” (Powledge)

In Africa, food insecurity is the main food supply concern. There are many factors that cause the insecurity. Weather and climate change is one cause. Africa has a drought like weather pattern, resulting in poor/failed harvest, making prices of available foods go up. There are pests and diseases that kill the livestock. Military conflicts, such as war, have worsen food insecurity, prevent aids to help the most

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)

Millions of people worldwide suffer from obesity and food insecurity. The extent of research on food security and obesity has increased considerably since 1995. At first, the relationship and topic between obesity and insecurity were considering as a contraction. But now, with more expanded research and knowledge, researchers Frongillo and Bernal have come to the conclusion that the “coexistence of food insecurity and obesity is expected given that both are consequences of economic and social disadvantage” (2014). Living in a food desert area, such as the community of Humphreys Country in Mississippi, people not only lack a balanced nutrition, but also are at an increased risk for chronic conditions like obesity, diabetes and heart diseases. With the help of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, opening supermarkets and distributing healthy alternatives by food trucks may lower the percentage of people who suffer from food insecurity and other health risks at the same time.