Discuss who food scarcity effects the poverty level of country
Answers
This profoundly important—and seemingly-simple—definition of food security from the World Food Summit of 1996 actually has four elements:
1. Enough food must be available to meet people’s needs.
2. People must have access to the food that is available under normal circumstances.
3. Volatility in production or prices must not threaten this availability, and
4. The quality of food that people consume must be adequate for their needs.
Availability of sufficient food is clearly a necessary condition for food security, and much policy thinking focuses solely on the question of availability. But as Nobel prizewinner Amartya Sen eloquently states in his classic Poverty and Famines, availability of enough food in the aggregate is not sufficient for food security. Most of the serious famines documented in his work—from the Great Bengal famine of 1941 to the Sahelian famines of the 1970s occurred when sufficient food was available. Analysis based solely on food availability frequently resulted in policies that exacerbated the problem—such as the refusal by the colonial authorities in Bengal to allow food imports.