Abstract:
Despite commitments to reducing hunger worldwide is enshrined in the first Millennium
Development Goal (which has the specific target of halving between 1990 and 2015); and
many development programs being implemented by governments of developing nations to
attain food security with the support of international donors, no significant achievement has
been made. Many millions of children and women in developing countries are still dying
every year because of lack of food and /or malnutrition and the problem o f hunger and
malnutrition so fa r have not been solved. Current estimates show that more than 1 billion
people in the world do not have enough to eat; food insecurity is widespread, and hunger
and under-nutrition continue to be serious problems, not only in developing countries but in
industrialized countries as well.
Therefore, freeing the world from hunger continues to be an unrealized dream and the issue
of food (in) security will continue to be a very important concern to this time in many parts of
the world, including Ethiopia where as many as 5 million people are recurrently food
insecure even in normal years of crop production.
In this context, having a conceptual understanding of food security and some of the
underlying causes and their implications for policy and development programming is crucial.
This module will therefore aims to introduce participants the key elements of food-security
theory and review approaches to food security, and of frameworks fo r investigating the wide
range of factors influencing food security as well as policy responses to food insecurity. It
will also discuss climate change and other cross cutting issues such as gender, HIV AIDs,
urbanization, pastoralism and their relation to food security.