Help
food security — English
The assurance that there will always be enough food for everybody in the world. Two hundred years ago, Thomas Malthus predicted that the world population would run out of food in the (then) not too distant future. However, for 200 years we have been able to produce far more than enough food for all. New technologies, better varieties of crop plants, irrigation to turn previously non-productive land into croplands, and policies to incentivise commercial agriculture have resulted in a huge increase in global food produced since the so-called Green Revolution of the 1950s. Unfortunately, more than half of the world population do not have enough food or are literally starving, but the reasons for that are political and economical, not a shortage of food. We currently produce far more than enough food to feed every man, woman and child over and over, but in Asia and especially Africa, millions of people are at starvation level. There is a large discordance between production and availability of food. Food security has become a field of study and the United Nations even has an agency to encourage food production and distribution, although it experiences serious difficulties to ensure the provision of food to starving masses in certain African countries. The challenge for the future is not the production of enough food, but the distribution of available supplies.
