Global Food Security and Future Aid: Historical Antecedents and Current Issues

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine global food security and future aid, assess international commitment to end hunger and nutrition, critically analyze the global failure in food security and review the emerging problems and impact of the GATT and Uruguay round. Effort was made to evaluate the global perspective of food aid. The major conclusions drawn from this paper were an estimated number of 70 million children suffer from malnutrition serious enough to jeopardize their chances of becoming healthy adults. Most of these children reside in sub-Saharan Africa. Development indicators have shown that it not possible to achieve the world food summit goal of reducing the number of malnourished people by 50% by 2015 even FAO estimates that this goal will be achieved by 2030. Increase in supply of food has been mainly in richer countries and has certainly not extended to Africa thus raising questions of access or entitlement to food supply. The demand for food will be further increased as a result of rising per capita income in many parts of the world. Projections of future annual food aid requirements to ranging from 40 million tones to meet status quo demand to 80 million tones. Finally, this paper recommends some strategies aimed at addressing problems and challenges of food insecurity and global food aid.