ABSTRACT
Food security refers to the availability of food and one’s access to it. A household is considered food secure when its occupants do not live in hunger or fear of starvation. Worldwide around 1 billion people are chronically hungry due to extreme poverty, while up to 2 billion people lack food security intermittently due to varying degrees of poverty [FAO 2003]. For many of these people, food security depends on income from agriculture, and thus on the quality and productivity of agricultural inputs such as land and labor. Six million children die of hunger every year-17,000 every day. In 2007, increased farming demand for biofuels, world oil prices at more than $100 a barrel, global population growth, climate change, loss of agricultural land to residential and industrial development, and growing consumer demand in China and India had pushed up grain prices. In India, 30 million people have been added to the ranks of the hungry since the mid-1990s and 46% of all children are underweight. It is not because India does not have suf…cient food in the buffer stock but because of the poor purchasing power of the ~30% of its population who live below the poverty line. Not only India but other south Asian countries have also been facing the food insecurity problem and some of them even with greater intensity. An alternative view takes a collective approach to achieving food security. This view states that, globally, enough food is produced to feed the entire world population at a level adequate to ensure that everyone can be free of hunger and that no one should live without enough food because of economic constraints or social inequalities. This approach is often referred to as “food justice,” and it views food security as a basic human right. It advocates fairer distribution of food, particularly grain crops, as a means of ending chronic hunger. The core of the food justice movement is the belief that what is lacking is not food, but the political will to fairly distribute food regardless of the recipient’s ability to pay. More than half of the planet’s population, approximately 3.3 billion people, live in urban areas as of November 2007. Any disruption to farm supplies may precipitate a uniquely urban food crisis in a relatively short time. The ongoing global credit crisis has affected farm credits, despite a boom in commodity prices.
