Poverty, Food Security and Politics

Rarely do people in their humdrum existence spare a thought for other fellow beings in suffering. How many of us, the educated, urban, middle-class and upper middle-class spare a thought for the hungry? Do we know that Hunger, the silent killer, is a giant killer? It is the "holocaust of our time" (read Per Pinstrup-Andersen and David Beckmann in Jindrova and de Graff) and that "about 20,000 persons per day die globally as a result of food insecurity, the majority in Africa and Asia. That number is approximately seven times the number killed in the 9/11 attacks-and it happens every day. If forty fully loaded 747s were to crash on a daily basis, would the world take notice?"(read Rethinking Food Security For The 21st Century, Walter P Falcon And Rosamond L Naylor). "The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO2004b) estimates that 5 million children die from hunger-related causes per year. The World Health Organization and other sources put the total number of hunger-related deaths at about 8 million annually (Hunger Project)" (read Rethinking Food Security For The 21st Century, by Walter P Falcon and Rosamond L Naylor). The above statistics should make every reader sit up and take note of the issue of Food Security like he has never done before. Why should people take note of Food Security? What is Food Security and what is its importance? Food Security is an essential element of overall human well-being and an important milestone on the path of complete poverty alleviation, an important goal of development of this millennium (or any millennia). This volume describes the "Concepts", dimension of Food Security and throws some light on several "Country experiences from the developing world" with a conspicuous focus on "India’s Food Security Strategy" for Indian readers.