'Too many people, not enough food' isn't the cause of hunger and food insecurity (original) (raw)
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Nutrition Reviews, 2009
Three distinct but related concepts have been used to estimate the numbers of people affected by hunger and to analyze the global food situation: food shortage, food poverty, and food deprivation. They focus on different aspects of the phenomenon of hunger and different levels of aggregation involved in its study. Food shortage occurs when total food supplies within a designated area—the world as a whole or continents, countries, or regions within countries—are insufficient to meet the needs of its population. Food poverty refers to the situation in which households cannot obtain enough food to meet the needs of all their members. Food deprivation refers to inadequate individual consumption of food or specific nutrients, also known as undernutrition. The relationships between food shortage, food poverty, and food deprivation are complex. If a region suffers a food shortage, some households will be food poor, and at least one household member will suffer food deprivation. Conversely, food poverty also can (and does) occur within regions where there is no aggregate food shortage, and individual food deprivation can occur in households that are not food poor. The key factor in both cases is distribution.
HUNGER: THE CAUSE AND CONSEQUENCE OF THE CONFLICT
Eradicating Hunger, 2018
Hunger is not only a consequence of conflict but can fuel and drive conflicts, especially in the presence of unstable political regimes, a youth bulge, stunted economic development, slow or falling economic growth, and high inequality. The conflict when reaches at its acute level, the food is the cause and consequence of most of the conflicts, so, it is termed as ‘Food War’. Food wars are defined to include the use of hunger as a weapon or hunger vulnerability that accompanies or follows destructive conflict. As per Amartya Sen (1981), conflict causes food insecurity by reducing food production, access to food, and human welfare and capabilities, and other social infrastructures.
2015
There is sufficient capacity and resources in the world to ensure adequate food and good nutrition for everyone. Nevertheless, in spite of progress made over the last two decades, an estimated 805 million people still suffer from chronic hunger defined here as lack of the necessary calories to cover the minimum energy needs. Among children, it is estimated that 171 million under five years of age are chronically malnourished (stunted), almost 104 million are underweight, and about 55 million are acutely malnourished (wasted). Micronutrient deficiencies, or “hidden hunger”, affect over two billion people worldwide, impeding human and socio-economic development and contributing to the vicious cycle of malnutrition and underdevelopment. At the same time, an estimated 1.4 billion people are overweight and 500 million are obese. Beyond the ethical dimensions of this complex problem, the human, social and economic costs to society at large are enormous in terms of lost productivity, healt...
Hunger Crisis Overview, 2023
Food Security has always dealt with as a critical national security worldwide and one of the most important files that has always been on the top of any UN world summit/conference. But Hunger was never by itself the problem, it was always a consequential symptom of other deeper ill practices among the world's empirical power holders! Global Unrest, COVID, The Climate Crisis and Rising Living-Costs fueled by the
Food Crises and the Ghost of Malthus
The ongoing international food crisis has provoked a number of social scientists, politicians and pundits to predict that the ideas of Malthus may yet be vindicated. Corresponding to this expectation is a tendency to confuse the principle of population with truisms relating to continuous population growth in a finite environment. The precise assumptions upon which Malthus’s principle of population actually rests are seldom emphasised or set against real relations and conditions of human societies. To remedy this the present article supplies a brief historical survey of the development, expression and practical employment of such ideas. It thereafter highlights the inability of the Malthus doctrine to account for food insecurity past and present. The doctrine is not analytically useful because populations must be pressed against the limits of capitalism ever before actual numbers and absolute limits of the social organisation of production can become a factor.