Food security
Food security is the state of having reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, healthy food. The availability of food for people of any class, gender, status, ethnicity, or religion is another element of food protection. Similarly, household food security is considered to exist when all the members of a family have consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life. Food-secure individuals do not live in hunger or fear of starvation. Food security includes resilience to future disruptions of food supply. Such a disruption could occur due to various risk factors such as droughts and floods, shipping disruptions, fuel shortages, economic instability, and wars. Food insecurity is the opposite of food security: a state where there is only limited or uncertain availability of suitable food.
The concept of food security has evolved over time. The four pillars of food security include availability, access, utilization, and stability. In addition, there are two more dimensions that are important: agency and sustainability. These six dimensions of food security are reinforced in conceptual and legal understandings of the right to food. The World Food Summit in 1996 declared that "food should not be used as an instrument for political and economic pressure."
Food insecurity goes beyond hunger; it includes people who do not have regular access to nutritious and sufficient food, even if they may not necessarily be suffering from hunger. In 2024, an estimated 28.0 percent of the world population, or 2.28 billion people, has experienced food insecurity at moderate or severe levels. There are many causes of food insecurity. The most important ones are high food prices and disruptions in global food supplies for example due to war. Climate change, water scarcity, land degradation, agricultural diseases, pandemics and disease outbreaks can also create food insecurity. Additionally, food insecurity affects individuals with low socioeconomic status, affects the health of a population on an individual level, and causes divisions in interpersonal relationships. Food insecurity due to unemployment causes a higher rate of poverty.
The effects of food insecurity can include hunger and even famines. Chronic food insecurity translates into a high degree of vulnerability to hunger and famine. Chronic hunger and malnutrition in childhood can lead to stunted growth of children. Once stunting has occurred, improved nutritional intake after the age of about two years is unable to reverse the damage. Severe malnutrition in early childhood often leads to defects in cognitive development.
About 2.3 billion people in the world are estimated to have been moderately or severely food insecure in 2024. The global prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity has declined gradually since 2021, reaching 28.0% in 2024. Food insecurity is on the rise in Africa and falling in Latin America and the Caribbean; it has been decreasing gradually in Asia for several consecutive years, while in Oceania and in Northern America and Europe, new estimates point to a slight decline from 2023 to 2024 following a several-year rise. Globally and in almost every region, food insecurity is more prevalent in rural areas than in urban areas.