In the mid-2020s, UN agencies estimated that around 700 million people, roughly one in eleven of the world's population, were chronically hungry. At the same time, about two and a half billion adults were overweight. The world grows enough food to feed everyone, so hunger today is mainly a question of access, which brings this course back to where the study of famine began.
What food security means
At the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, governments agreed on a definition that is still standard. In paraphrase, food security exists when everyone, at all times, can obtain enough safe and nutritious food to meet their needs and preferences for an active, healthy life. Analysts usually break this into four pillars. Availability asks whether enough food exists. Access asks whether people can obtain it, through income, markets or their own farms. Utilization asks whether the body can make use of the food, which depends on clean water, sanitation and health. Stability asks whether all of these hold up through droughts, price spikes and wars.
The four pillars explain why hunger and plenty sit side by side. A country can have full warehouses and still have hungry people, because access fails, or enough calories but children stunted by diarrhea from dirty water, because utilization fails. Malnutrition includes both undernourishment and obesity, and many poor countries now face both at once, sometimes in the same household. The double burden of malnutrition is undernutrition and obesity found in the same place.
Food as a right
Food security describes a condition. A human rights approach goes further and asks who owes what to whom. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 names food as part of the right to an adequate standard of living, in Article 25. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, adopted in 1966, goes further in Article 11, recognizing a basic right of everyone to be free from hunger. The UN committee that oversees the covenant has explained that the right to food does not mean governments must hand out meals to everyone. States must respect the right, by not destroying people's access to food; protect it, by stopping others from doing so; and fulfill it, which means stepping in directly when people cannot feed themselves.
This approach treats a hungry person not as an object of charity but as a rights holder with claims on the community, a view that fits the idea that every person has equal worth. Critics, including some economists, question whether such broad rights can be enforced when budgets are tight, and worry that courts are poorly placed to set food policy. Defenders reply that rights give the poor a lever to hold governments to account.
Food sovereignty
Some movements argue that food security, as usually defined, says nothing about who controls food. In 1996 the international peasant movement La Via Campesina put forward the idea of food sovereignty, the right of peoples to shape their own food and farming policies, with priority for local producers over global markets. Supporters see it as a defense of small farmers against large corporations and cheap imports. Critics answer that trade has often reduced hunger and that self-sufficiency can leave a country exposed when its own harvest fails.
Cash or food?
Helping hungry people raises practical questions too. For decades much international food aid was shipped as grain from donor countries, which supported donor farmers but could take months to arrive and could undercut local farmers in the receiving country. Many agencies now prefer cash or vouchers when markets are working, since cash transfers let families buy food locally and support local markets. Shipped food remains vital where markets have collapsed, as in war zones and sieges.
Worked example: India's school meals
In 2001, during a drought, the People's Union for Civil Liberties went to India's Supreme Court. It pointed out that government warehouses held millions of tons of surplus grain while people in drought-hit states went hungry. The court treated the right to food as part of the constitutional right to life and issued a series of orders over the following years. One of the most important required state governments to serve cooked midday meals in government primary schools.
The midday meal scheme grew into one of the largest school feeding programs in the world, serving more than one hundred million children. Studies have linked it to higher school attendance, especially among girls, and to better nutrition. Children of different castes eating together has also chipped away at old social barriers, though there has been resistance in some places. In 2013 India's parliament passed the National Food Security Act, which made subsidized grain a legal entitlement for about two thirds of the population.
The case brings together this course's main threads. Food was available; access failed. A court and a free press turned a policy question into a matter of rights. And the remedy, feeding children at school, treated each child as someone the community owed food to, not as an object of pity.