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World Food Situation: Hunger, Malnutrition, Poverty and

Environment

FAB-465

Lecture 4

Outline

• Basic Definitions and Concepts

• The current scenario

• What is Food Insecurity?

• Factors affecting food security

• Goals to eradicate food insecurity

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Sobering Facts

• Nearly 1 billion people are affected by hunger globally each year (almost 1 in 8)

• Severe acute malnutrition is the cause of death of almost 34 million children annually

• 200 million children are suffering from stunting

• 35% of all deaths among children under 5 years are due to undernutrition.

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Hunger?

• the uneasy or painful sensation caused by want of food; craving appetite. Also the exhausted condition caused by want of food

• the want or scarcity of food in a country

• a strong desire or craving

(Oxford English Dictionary 1971)

Hunger and Undernourishment (FAO)

• Undernourishment: The inability of a person to acquire enough food to meet the daily minimum energy requirements over a period of one year.

• Hunger: FAO defines hunger as being synonymous with chronic undernourishment

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Facts about hunger

• More than 800 million people go to bed hungry every day, 200-300 million are children.

• Of these 300 million children, only eight percent are victims of famine or other emergency situations. More than 90 percent are suffering long-term malnourishment and micronutrient deficiency.

• Every 3.6 seconds another person dies of starvation and the large majority are children under the age of 5.

Poverty

• UNESCO has classified poverty into two different categories i.e. Absolute and Relative

”Absolute poverty measures poverty in relation to the amount of money necessary to meet basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter”

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Poverty across the Globe

• More than one billion people in the world live on less than one dollar a day.

• Another 2.7 billion struggle to survive on less than two dollars per day.

• In developing countries it means having to walk more than one mile everyday simply to collect water and firewood, and suffering from diseases that were eliminated from rich countries ages ago.

FOOD SECURITY

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Food Security

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.

- 1996 World Food Summit Food Insecurity “consistent access to adequate food is limited by a lack of money and other resources at times during the year.” - United States Department of

Agriculture (USDA)

Dimensions of Food Security

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Malnutrition

• Malnutrition: Deficiencies, excesses or imbalances in the consumption of macro- and/or micronutrients.

• Malnutrition may be an outcome of food insecurity, or it may relate to non-food factors, such as:

- inadequate care practices for children,

- insufficient health services; and

- an unhealthy environment.

www.foodsec.org

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Risk of Inadequate Nutrition

Relationship between Poverty, Food Insecurity and Malnutrition

• Environmental degradation

• Resource scarcity

• Climate change

• Volatile, distorted and non-transparent markets

• Governance issue

www.foodsec.org

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Food Security Indicators

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Goals of Eradicating Food Insecurity

• Raising agriculture production

• Increasing access to sufficient nutritious food

• Stabilizing food supply by minimizing post harvest losses

Factors influencing food security Food Waste and Food Loss

Population

Water

Soil

Oil

Politics?

Other Factors?

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Food Loss vs Food Waste

Food Loss

Decrease in edible food mass throughout the part of the supply chain

Production, post harvest and processing stages

Food Waste

Food discarded at the retail or final consumption stage

Related to retailers’ and consumers’ behaviour

1/3 of the edible part of food produced for human consumption gets lost or wasted. (1.3 billion tons

per year)

Types of Food Losses/Wastes

• 5 system boundaries in the FSC of vegetables and animal commodities

– Agricultural Production

– Post-harvest handling and storage

– Processing

– Distribution

– Consumption

Food Loss

Food Waste

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Developed World vs Developing World

• The most common dietary problem in wealthy countries is over-nutrition.

– In NA and Europe, average daily caloric intake is 3,500 calories.

• In 1960, Africa was a net exporter of food; today the continent imports one-third of its grain.

• More than 40 percent of Africans do not even have the ability to obtain sufficient food on a day-today basis.

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Production volumes of each commodity

group, per region (million tonnes)

www.fao.org

Per capita Food Losses and Food Wastes

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Water Shortages • Major global problem areas

And the big one!

• Humankind expends in one year an amount of fossil fuel that it took nature roughly a million years to produce.

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We are a non-sustainable society

• Food production, land use, water use etc. are part of a larger problem affecting every aspect of our lives, including:

– Energy use

– Waste handling

– Pollution

– Population

– and on and on…..

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Initiatives to counter Food Insecurity

• World Food Programme (WFP)

• World Food Summit (WFS)

• Millennium Development Goals (MDG)

World Hunger Map (FAO)

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Millennium Development Goals

World Food Summit Goals

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Factors in success towards food security

• Favour

– Economic growth

– Agricultural productivity growth

– Markets (including International trade)

– Social protection