Impacts of Global Food Insecurity

What is Food Security?Food security, at the individual, household, national, regional and global levels, is achieved when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.

—World Food Summit, Overseas Development Institute, 1997

Food security is comprised of four components:

1. Food availability

2. Food accessibility

3. Food utilization

4. Food stability

With 100 million people on the brink of abject poverty, the cost of food will not be measured in the price of wheat and rice, but in the rising number of infant and child deaths across Africa.

Kofi Annan, Former UN Secretary-General

What is Food Sovereignty?

This is the right of a person or country to determine its own agricultural systems and food policies without inside intervention

Sovereignty should include the following rights:

• to prioritize local agriculture production in order to feed local people and not for export

• for peasants and landless people to access land, water, seeds and credit

• of farmers to produce food

• for consumers to be able to decide what they consume (+ culturally appropriate food), and choose how and by whom it was produced

What is Food Sovereignty?

• to farm sustainably

• the recognition of the role of women in agricultural production

• to participate in developing agricultural policies

• to protect from low-priced food and food imports by having the right to impose taxes on excessively cheap imports

Source: adapted from UN—What is food sovereignty?

What is Food Sovereignty?

Social Political Economic Environmental

Big Picture – Broad Impacts

Impacts on Children Continuum from World Vision Hunger Resource

Impacts on Families

I’m so scared … I don’t know what we’ll do now. We can’t live without rice. For poor people, a grain of rice is like a pearl.

—Nguyen "i Bich Hoang, small-scale fruit seller in Vietnam

Middle income Families

Middling Poor

The Poor

The Desperate

Impacts on Families

Impacts on Families

Canada - 10%

Developing countries - 60%

Even temporarily depriving children of the nutrients they need to grow and thrive can leave permanent scars in terms of stunting their physical growth and intellectual potential.

—Andrew "orne-Lyman, WFP nutritionist

Impacts on Children

Food Insecurity and Child Rights