Food security
In 1943 about thirty lakh people died of starvation and disease in the province of Bengal. Drawings from the famine years show emaciated men and women, ribs showing, arriving at a relief centre, and a thin family walking away from its village past a dry field carrying a baby, a pot and little else. A disaster on that scale forces a basic question on any society about what it takes for everyone to have enough to eat.
The idea of food security has changed over time. In the 1970s the UN understood it mainly as supply, an adequate stock of basic foods available at all times. Amartya Sen moved the focus to whether each person can actually get hold of food. He called the routes by which a person obtains food their entitlements.
The food a person can command through what they produce themselves, what they can exchange in the market (for example by selling their labour), and what the state or community provides.
The World Food Summit of 1996 built on this wider view. Its definition, still used by FAO, applies to individuals, households, regions, nations and the whole world.
A situation in which all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to enough safe, nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.
FAO's current wording adds social access to physical and economic access. A person is food insecure when they lack regular access to enough safe, nutritious food for normal growth and development and an active, healthy life. The Summit also accepted that ending poverty is essential if people are to reach the food they need.
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