Food Security Paragraph

Food security is a measure of the availability of food and individuals ability to access it. According to the United Nations Committee on World Food Security, food security is defined as the means that all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life.

A household is considered food secure when its inhabitants do not live in hunger or fear of starvation. There are three pillars that determine food security, food availability, food access, and food use and misuse. Food availability relates to the supply of food through production, distribution and exchange. Food access refers to the affordability and allocation of food, as well as the preferences of individuals and households. 

The causes of hunger and malnutrition are often not a scarcity of food but an inability to access available food, usually due to poverty. The next pillar of food security is food utilisation, which refers to the metabolism of food by individuals. 

Once food is obtained by a household, a variety of factors affect the quantity and quality of food that reaches to the members of the household. In order to achieve food security, the food ingested must be safe and must be enough to meet the physiological requirements of each individual.