Food Insecurities Essay

Have you ever seen a person yell at his colleague or his partner, all overreacting on a particular issuing that has caused non only the person who got yel direct at to feel annoyed, still overly ordinal parties who feel ab f every last(predicate) out it or consider witnessed the scene? For the numerous who do non wish to get into the mess, or has enough system of logic sense to not judge immediately, they will to a greater extent than or less promising harbour out a fair statement and try to reason out that persons overreaction by saying he probably had a bad day or he probably has dilemma at home. However, if we take a bit closer and look closely, all of us will eventually absorb that it all goes down to one matter peril.Insecurities atomic number 18 not approximatelything tonic and unfamiliar to the homo kind. Everyone has insecurities, regardless of whether they realise it or not. The Oxford Dictionary defines danger as the uncertainty or misgiving about ones elf or lack of confidence. Insecurities exist in every dungeon soul on this planet. Till today, it is still seen as a forbid matter as not galore(postnominal) take away addressed this effect in proper ways using proper mediums. Most p arnts jadet even talk about it and shove it away when their children descend to speak up about it. Little do population know that the slightest things in life ar the ones that add up to our insecurities.The amount of insecurity in a person differs from one to the other. The types of insecurities that one possesses also vary. The close to common type of insecurity is physical insecurity. Lets sheath it human beings ar never satisfied. Even when you have all the separate of the body needed to sustain and go through your daily purpose with ease, you still beg for more. Some want healthier and shiner hair, both(prenominal) want to be taller, however most importantly, everyone wants several(prenominal)thing. It is not just human beings as an separate who compositors case insecurities, but also countries and states.Currently, the world is looking at at the issue of food for thought insecurity, which is also classified as a type of insecurity. Food security may be said as the availability of food and ones regain to it. Hence, the United Nations have defined food security as all people at all times having both physical and economic access to the staple food they need. For more than 2 billion of people on this planet, they argon lucky to not worry about this form of insecurity. However, we might not realise this but this matter is more complicated than it seems. Food securities may result from legion(predicate) different causes.It is imperative that we focus on wherefore argon the food insecure, and why are the people are food insecure. Among the most common causes of food insecurities are drought and extreme support changes. This setback, which is very commonly formulationd by third world countries, ordinarily floats from overnight floods to droughts. In short, the climate changes faced by these countries are extreme. In most African countries, like Nigeria, droughts are not new to them. It has been a setback since the time of their ancestors nonetheless, they are helpless at it and have no comeback on solving this matter.In many comparisons throughout time, some of the most severe food crises were all preceded by drought or by other analogously extreme weather events. These extremities result in poor and failed harvests which in turn results food scarcity and high prices of the on hand(predicate) food. As mentioned in the Climate and Development Knowledge Ne iirk narrative entitled Managing Climate Extremes and Disasters in the Agriculture Sectors Lessons from the IPCC SREX Report, much(prenominal) king of nature causes impacts which will include not only food insecurity, but changing productivity and livelihood patterns, economic losses, and impacts on the infrastructure.Besides that, the inbred resource base for the poor and food-insecure is invariably narrow and, in many do master(prenominal)s, fragile. With the exception of Uganda only 4 to 10 per centum of the land area is classed as arable, and just a small area of land able for rainfed cultivation. The greatest numbers of poor people are concentrated in the arid and semi-arid ecosystems and on marginal land in the higher rainwater parts of the region. It has start out axiomatic to say that poverty is one of the principal(prenominal) causes of environmental degradation.This can be seen all too cl azoic in the farming of steep slopes, which takes place as an increasing population is pressure to cultivate marginal land. The falling crop yields that characterize the marginal areas are a result of the loss of massive quantities of top dominion throughout the region, declining soil fertility as fal rugged systems are replaced by continuous cultivation, reductions in soil organic matter as manure is burnt for fuel, and shoplifting holding sizes. However, the poor are also the most vulnerable to environmental degradation because they face on he exploitation of common position resources for a greater share of their incomes than richer households do. In the rangelands, the evidence for long blue environmental degradation is ambiguous. The successive cyclical growth and decline of herds reflects cycles of pelting and rangeland productivity, and is perfectly normal. As animals die in large numbers, the rangelands recover unco quickly. However, when there is a major drop in the number of animals, the people who depend on them for their livelihoods also suffer.Development programmes that have sought to append animal production on rangelands through water development and animal disease prevention have all too often failed to find, at the same time, sustainable ways of increasing animal commissariat, so the resulting increase numbers of animals may wreak havoc on the range itse lf. galore(postnominal) of the available freshwater resources are in river basins and lakes that extend beyond the boundaries of individual nations.Shared water resources include lakes Victoria, Albert, Edward, Kivu and Turkana and major rivers such as the benighted Nile, White Nile, Atbara, Awash and Shebele. The potential for developing irrigation from these sources is constrained by the enigma of achieving agreement on sharing the resources and avoiding conflict. Although natural climatic factors have contend their part in the process of desertification, in general, it is increased population and the relate development of unsustainable production systems that have had most negative impact on the fragile natural resource base.Wood and manure have remained the main sources of domestic energy, even in urban centres. This situation has contributed to depleting the forest and range resources, resulting in an overall decrease in biomass and biodiversity, reduced water percolation and increased runoff and soil erosion. These factors, which contribute to the impoverishment of ecosystems, have led to a vicious circle of environmental degradation, lower system resilience to erratic rainfall, decreased agricultural productivity and increased poverty and food insecurity.Not only that, the cause of food insecurity in these third world countries are also caused by the poor state of development and maintenance of roads and transport, energy sources and telecommunications in the marginal areas of countries in the owl of Africa makes it difficult for these areas to become integrated into the national and regional economy. As with all other indicators of development, the countries of the region have some of the worst figures worldwide with delight in to access to roads and water supply.A recent report suggests that, in terms of access to infrastructure, the gap between Africa and the rest of the world has widened over the past 15 years. The sparse road and communicati ons network hampers pinch relief operations as well as the commercialization of the uncouth economy. The density of the road network in the countries of the region gives an idea of both how difficult it is to reach people in rural areas with function and the problems such people face in participating in the market economy.For example, in Ethiopia, every kilometre of road serves 72 km 2 and 3 000 people, compared with only 8 km 2 and 850 people in conglutination Africa. Even after strenuous efforts by development agencies and NGOs, access to a clean water supply is still an unobtainable luxury for most rural inhabitants in the Horn. Piped systems are uncommon in rural areas and protected wells and hand pumps are the best that rural communities can expect. The warhead of collecting water, as with so many other menial tasks, locomote almost exclusively on women in the communities, who must spend many hours each day collecting water from unsafe sources.The statistics on access t o water and sanitation reveal wide differences within the region. In leash countries, namely Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia, only one-quarter of the population has access to safe water, and in two others (the Sudan and Uganda) the figure is less than 50 percent. Access to sanitation is as low as 13 percent and, except for Kenya, barely exceeds 50 percent anywhere. In addition to that, the indicators of access to social services in the countries that face the setback of food insecurity are also among the lowest in the world.While the average figures are bad enough, they mask fundamental inequalities in access to services within the region. Again, rural areas, especially remote, low-potential areas are the to the lowest degree well served. Nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoralists are the most difficult populations to provide services to and, consequently, they are invariably the ones with the poorest health services and least education. All these indicators, have with malnutrition and poor access to safe water, have adverse consequences for productivity and for the long-term physical and cognitive development of people in the region.Also, let us not forget the fact that crop and plants as well face diseases. Diseases affecting livestock or crops can have devastating personal effects on food availability especially if there are no emergency back-up plans in place. For example, an epidemic of stem rust on husk which was spreading across Africa and into Asia in 2007 caused major concern. A virulent straw disease could destroy most of the worlds main drinking straw crops, leaving millions to starve. The fungus had spread from Africa to Iran and may already be in Pakistan. A different threat, on the other hand, has attacked the African continents stake biggest crop wheat.In 1999, 50 years since the last outbreak, a contemporaneous and virulent strain of stem rust attacked the Ugandan crops. Its spores then travelled to Ethiopia and Kenya, before appearing in Iran last year. The Food and Agriculture institution of the United Nation (FAO) has given warning to six other countries in the Central and South Asia to be prepared and keep an eye for symptoms of this new strain while scientists in the United States of America are functional diligently in searching for a resistant that combats this problem.It is important that the mend for this will be obtained quickly as in India alone more than 50 million small-scale farmers are at risk because they depend on wheat for their food and earnings. Most importantly, we must not cast that politics and dictatorship also execute a role in food insecurity. Many do not realise that politics play a part in something as serious as this. As mentioned by Nobel Prize-winning economist Amarya Sen, There is no such thing as an apolitical food problem. It is more often than not that the administration of the acres that determines its severity, or even whether the famine will occur. If truth be told, the twentiet h century is full of examples of governments undermining the food security of their own nations. Let us take a look at Nigeria, Africas most thickly inhabited state, where a legacy of corrupted governance and an economy ground primarily on oil exports has left the agriculture sector importantly undermined, leaving millions of Nigerians in deep hunger.True, the neighbouring countries export food to Nigeria in alter for money, but remember the people in these neighbouring countries need food too. And they are much poorer than those living in Nigeria. It was reported by the United Nations that thousands of children in countries neighbouring Nigeria died because of malnutrition. These kids paid the price not because of food shortage in their hoidenish, but because of food shortage in Nigeria. The distribution of food is often a political issue in most countries.The government will eternally give priority to urban areas and cities, since most influential and powerful families and en terprises are located there. The ruling government over and over again for generations overlooks the subsistence farmers and rural areas in general. In other words, the more rural an area, the less likely the government will pay attention to solving its needs. Whats more is that the governments of these countries would normally keep the price of basic grain at extremely low levels that subsistence farmers cannot accumulate sufficient capital to make investments to improve their production.Hence, they are prevented from getting out of their precarious situation. In addition, food has always been a political arsenal by the dictators and warlords, where they reward their supporters and deny food supplies to those areas that are against them. Under this condition, food has become more like a silver instead of a basic need that cannot be denied rights of. Food has become the money to buy support and used against the opposition. Even in Guatemala, income unlikeness is amongst the worst in the world, with indigenous communities at a disadvantage.In some areas, an estimated 75 percent of the children, ranging from infants to children ages six and seven years old, are bad malnourished. And this is a shocking statistic relating food scarcity coming from a country that is merely a four-hour flight away from the USA. Furthermore, it was pointed out in William Bernsteins 2004 publication entitled The Birth of Plenty that individuals without property will atomic number 82 to starvation and it is much easier to bend the fearful and the hungry to the will of the state.If a farmers property can be arbitrarily peril by the state, that power will inevitably be used to trammel those with different political and religious opinions. It is fundamental and crucial that we understand and be aware of the consequences of this global food scarcity. The effects might be similar to the effects of malnutrition and hunger, where, at the outset, the human population will be bear on gr eatly in the sense where stunted growth may occur. The stunt starts in when the baby is still in the mothers womb and happens till the age of three.Once stunting happens, giving proper nutrition to these helpless children will not help in reversing the damage or improving the childs condition. Pregnant mothers who do not prevail the correct amount of nutrition needed may risk of having a higher chance of infant and child mortality later on, which is, of course, a very heartbreaking circumstance. Apart from that, severe malnutrition during ones early childhood also leads to defects in cognitive development.Stunted individuals also have a higher chance of getting diseases and illnesses as compared to those who have not experienced stunting. It must also come to the attention that food insecurity is also associated with various developmental consequences for children in the United States. A seek was conducted by Diana F. Jyoti, Edward A. Frongillo, and Sonya J. Jones to prove that food insecurity is linked to specific developmental consequences for children, and whether these consequences may be both nutritional and nonnutritional.