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Food Security Assessment, GFA-15
Stacey Rosen and Shahla Shapouri (Coordinators), Birgit
Meade, Michael Trueblood, William Liefert, and Constanza Valdes
Agriculture and Trade Report No. (GFA15), May 2004
Participants at the 1996 World Food Summit pledged to reduce
the number of malnourished people by half by 2015. Signatory
countries bear the burden of meeting the longer term goal, but
short-term economic and political shocks remain serious obstacles.
Identifying the roles of different factors that lead to hunger
should help the international community plan and set strategies
for the most food insecure countries and regions.
What Is the Issue?
The world's resources are adequate to produce enough food for
its population. However, because the available food is distributed
unevenly, many countries experience food insecurity, where food
supplies are inadequate to maintain per capita consumption or
meet nutritional requirements. Food insecurity, while rarely
viewed as an emergency, reduces a society's productivity and
long-term growth.
Most of the hungry people, ironically, live in rural areas
where food is produced. Food security depends on food availability,
food access (ability to purchase food), and food utilization,
which is affected by factors such as safe water, education,
and health. Food insecurity can be either temporary or chronic,
and overcoming each requires a different set of strategies.
The reasons for food insecurity are many: war, poverty, population
growth, inadequate agricultural technology, inappropriate policies,
environmental degradation, and poor health.
What Did the Study Find?
Food security improved slightly in 2003 compared with 2002
in the 70 low-income countries studied in this report. Overall,
the estimated number of people in these countries consuming
less than recommended nutritional requirements dropped from
more than 1 billion in 2002 to just over 900 million in 2003.
Although food security is expected to improve in all regions
over the coming decade, this improvement will vary. Food security
is projected to improve most significantly in Asia, followed
by Latin America and the Caribbean. Increased grain production
rates and slowing population growth are expected to help improve
food security in Asia over the next decade. Afghanistan, despite
its recovering agricultural sector, will remain the most vulnerable
country in the region. A favorable economic outlook should improve
food security in most nations in the Latin American region,
with the exception of Haiti and Nicaragua. Food aid is expected
to continue to play a vital role in the food security outlook
in these two nations.
Although some improvement is also expected in Sub-Saharan Africa,
the deep poverty at the root of hunger problems will remain
unchanged. Although the number of hungry people in Sub-Saharan
Africa is expected to rise from 381 million in 2003 to 490 million
in 2013, the share of hungry people as a part of the entire
population is expected to stay at 59 percent over the same period.
Food aid has been and continues to be an important tool for
the international community to fight hunger in low-income countries,
and the United States is the dominant food-donor country. However,
the effectiveness of food aid could be improved by increased
coordination between donor groups, more transparent eligibility
criteria, and fewer fluctuations in year-to-year aid levels.
How Was the Study Conducted?
ERS' Food Security Assessment measures food access and availability
in 70 low-income, developing countries in Africa, Asia, Latin
America, and the Commonwealth of Independent States. The analysis
includes projections of food gaps as well as the number of hungry
people in these countries from 2003 through 2013.
Estimations of food gaps are based on differences between consumption
targets and estimates of food availability, which is domestic
supply (production plus commercial and food aid imports) minus
nonfood use. The estimated gaps are used to evaluate food security
of the study countries. The food gaps are calculated using two
consumption targets: 1) maintaining base per capita consumption
or status quo, which is the amount of food needed to support
2000-2002 levels of per capita consumption; and 2) meeting nutritional
requirements, which is the gap between available food and food
needed to support a minimum per capita nutritional standard.
Aggregate food availability projections do not take into account
food distribution difficulties within a country. Although lack
of data is a major problem, this report attempts to project
food consumption by different income groups based on income
distribution data for each country. The income-consumption relationship
is used to allocate the projected level of food availability
among different income groups. The estimated "distribution
gap" measures the food needed to raise consumption in each
income quintile to the minimum nutritional requirement. Finally,
based on the projected population, we project the number of
people who cannot meet their nutritional requirements.
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