Food Security

Food security is the measure of the ability ensure access to essential nutrition. It refers to a household's or country's ability to provide future physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that fulfills the dietary needs and food preferences of that household for living an active and healthy life. It measures of the resilience to the disruption of critical food supply due to various risk factors including droughts, shipping disruptions, fuel shortages, economic instability, wars, etc. Food security assessment is divided into the self-sufficiency rate (S) and external dependency rate (1-S) as this divides the largest set of risk factors. Although countries may desire a high self-sufficiency rate, this difficult to achieve especially for wealthy countries, generally due to higher regional production costs.

The World Health Organization defines three facets of food security: food availability, food access, and food use. Food availability is having available sufficient quantities of food on a consistent basis. Food access is having sufficient resources, both economic and physical, to obtain appropriate foods for a nutritious diet. Food use is the appropriate use based on knowledge of basic nutrition and care, as well as adequate water and sanitation. The FAO adds a fourth facet: the stability of the first three dimensions of food security over time.

Read more about Food Security:  Food Production Increases, Stunting and Chronic Nutritional Deficiencies, Challenges To Achieving Food Security, Economic Approaches, World Summit On Food Security, Role of The World Bank

Famous quotes containing the words food and/or security:

    Hume, and other sceptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expense. Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth, sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.
    Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)

    When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.
    Willa Cather (1876–1947)