FOOD SECURITY

What is food security?

According to 1996-FAO World food summit held in Rome, Italy defines food security as when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. 

According to the definition above, food security is achieved when all individuals have access to food (access to food can be impacted by economic or physical status), hence "food insecurity" occurs when people are unable to purchase adequate food. 

Furthermore, food security is achieved when everyone consumes safe food (free from hazards, i.e., chemical hazards such as plastics, benzenes, and other poisonous chemicals, biological hazards such as microbial contaminations, and physical hazards such as the presence of stones in food, hair in food, and dust)

Finally, food security is achieved when all individuals receive nutritious food; hence, the food ingested should have the necessary nutrients. Consider the majority of GMOs. Several of these may be deficient in naturally occurring nutrients (this can be defined as food insecurity; we will discuss GMOs later on)

As a result, let us brainstorm together: "DO WE HAVE FOOD SECURITY IN OUR SOCIETY??" (Think about society as a whole rather than just one home.)

Most of us will realize that we don’t have food security in our society, countries and in the world generally. 

Hence, in a given nation, we may find diverse regions with distinct reasons of food insecurity: other parts will lack sufficient funds to purchase food; other regions have fertile land and favorable meteorological circumstances; they cultivate and harvest each year; other regions cannot. According to statistics from Tanzania's Ministry of Industry, Commerce, and Marketing, certain locations have favorable climatic conditions for agriculture, such as Mbeya, Ruvuma, Kilimanjaro, Kagera, Morogoro, Tanga, Shinyanga, and others, while others, such as Dar es Salaam, Dodoma, Pwani, and Tabora, do not. As a result, food produced in the Mbeya region will be transported to Dodoma and sold there, bringing the food security situation back into balance between food surplus and food deficit areas. And this applies to the entire world; for example, because the United States is the world's largest producer of maize, they will offer it to other nations that lack maize as a food source.

ENVIRONMENT AND FOOD SECURITY. 

We all know that there is no food without an ecosystem. All of the things we eat come from the environment.

The environment (soil, water, air, temperature, and so on) has a 90% role in food production; the remaining 10% comes from personnel, engineering equipment, financial investments, and other inputs.

Just consider if we will have food security in the future if the environment continues to deteriorate on a daily basis. No, it does not.

Environmental policies and initiatives must be enacted for the sake of future generations. My dear ambassadors, let us raise our voices as usual to strengthen environmental protection in order to ensure food sustainability.