Food Security
 

What is it?

Food security is the availability of food and a person’s access to it. A household is considered food secure when its occupants do not live in hunger and/or fear of starvation.

World-wide around 852 million men, women and children are chronically hungry due to extreme poverty while up to 2 billion people lack food security intermittently due to varying degrees of poverty. (FAO, 2003)

A direct relationship exists between food consumption levels and poverty. Families with the financial resources to escape extreme poverty rarely suffer from chronic hunger; while poor families not only suffer the most from chronic hunger, but are also the segment of the population most at risk during food shortages and famines.
 

Achieving food security

The First Millennium Development Goal is to ‘Eradicate extreme hunger and poverty’. To achieve this, agricultural productivity is likely to play a key role if the goal is to be reached by 2015.

Three-quarters of the world’s poor and hungry are located in rural areas. They depend on agriculture and agriculture-related activities for their food and income. Increasing agricultural productivity simultaneously addresses more food and provides more income to purchase food. Increasing agricultural productivity has had very powerful results in reducing poverty and food insecurity.
 

More information on our food security work

We assist our partners with food security and agriculture programming in:

• Angola with Evangelical Church of Angola
• Bolivia with Bolivian Baptist Union
• El Salvador with Emmanuel Baptist Church
• India with Burden of Love for the Economically and Socially Suppressed, Council of Christian Hospitals and Sharon Education Society
• Kenya with Africa Brotherhood Church and African Christian Church and Schools
• Rwanda with Association of Baptist Churches of Rwanda