Food security
The importance of food security: what factors threaten it?
The United Nations (UN) has included the global challenge of the fight against hunger among its Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Sustainable Development Goal 2, also known as "Zero Hunger", calls to an end of all types of hunger and malnutrition by 2030, particularly among children, and it underlines the importance of sustainable agriculture. Around the world, as warned by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), there are paradoxical situations such as the fact that in recent years hunger has increased alongside other forms of malnutrition such as obesity.
What is food security?
The concept of food security emerged in the seventies. This has developed into the current definition that encompasses a range of economic, social and cultural variables. According to the FAO, in a definition established at the World Food Summit (WFS) in Rome in 1996, food security is achieved when everyone has physical, social and economic access at all times to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.
Causes of food insecurity: challenges and threats
According to the United Nations, one in every nine people in the world is currently malnourished — that's 815 million people —. The figure is expected to climb to two billion people by 2050 if nothing is done. How have we come to be in this situation? There are many causes, such as soil depletion, water shortages, air pollution, climate change, population explosion, economic crisis and governance issues.
Importance of food security
According to the FAO report The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2025, it is estimated that around 673 million people suffered from hunger in 2024, representing 8.2% of the world's population. These data prove that food security, although it does not affect everyone equally, is a global problem. The fundamentals that allow us to establish food security levels are as follows:
Availability
This refers to production, imports, storage and also food aid, understood as a transfer in case of need, whether at local or national level.
Stability
Food insecurity can be temporary due to issues related to the seasonal nature of agricultural campaigns or the cyclical nature of economic crises. Storage is important to prevent this.
Access
People may lack access to food due to physical factors (insufficient food supplies or isolation of populations) or socio-economic factors (high prices or lack of monetary resources).
Consumption
Food intake must meet nutritional needs, but also food preferences.
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Types and examples of food security
Biological use of foods, which link nutritional status and health, provides the accepted definition of food insecurity, in other words, insufficient food intake — whether temporary during a crisis — seasonal — due to farm production — or chronic — when ongoing —. In 2013, the FAO launched the Voices of the Hungry and established The Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) that measures the access of people and homes to food. The levels are as follows:
- Minor food insecurity. This occurs when there is uncertainty regarding the ability to obtain food.
- Moderate food insecurity. When the quality and variety of food is drastically compromised or intake is reduced and meals are skipped.
- Severe food insecurity. This is when no food is eaten for one or more days.
As one might expect, food insecurity is extremely harmful to health, especially in children. From death by diarrhoea — the second-most common cause of death among children under the age of five according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) — to poor academic performance and growth retardation.
In recent years factors such as the climate crisis, armed conflicts, the indebtedness of vulnerable countries and food price inflation have caused this problem to affect both developed countries, which suffer from rising commodity prices and market volatility, and countries that already suffered from chronic food insecurity, where the impacts are exacerbated and crises are prolonged.