Busy Station Road and Vendors, Pilibhit City, India

Food security is the basic ability to grow or buy food necessary to meet the nutritional needs of a person or family. Even before the Industrial age, the ability to grow food for personal use decreased as people moved into cities that didn’t have the available land to use for gardens. Supplying the food became reliant on being able to safely transport the crops grown in outlaying farms. The secondary aspect became the ability of people in cities to be able to afford to buy the food from vendors for farm products. The traditional aspect of this is the Farmer’s Market and roadside farm stands which still exists into the 21st century. Food security is now threatened by drought and the lack of means to purchase food. Crops and fruit trees require water to successfully grow. People need jobs to have the money to purchase food. Both are nothing new in the way that meeting nutritional needs is met in all the centuries of humans.

Migration routes from drought stricken areas to those with a higher level of water via rivers or sufficient seasonal rain have not all been traced but by marking the expansion of various ethnicities we can see that most were driven by the expansion of a population and need of a continuous food supply.

In today’s world, the marked areas of drought have expanded as the use of water has increased by virtue of the needs of water for industrial, population use and climate change.

This has led to various governments  devise’s to restrict either water use or migration. To me, it is more akin to sticking one’s thumb in a dike when the rest of the dike is failing. Without population control, the need for both water and reliable food supplies increase with the increase in population.

The lack of any well thought out means for sufficient water and provision of food leads to increasing unrest in a society. Adding the pressure of migration from drought areas where there isn’t sufficient means to meet the need of water or food increases the response, either adverse or positive depending on that societies response.

No one can underestimate the pressure’s that are building in the world concerning food security and drought. Adequately dealing with the resultant pressure’s is going to need a world forum response. The UN is a part of this but individual governments also need to adequately address the issue within their own borders.

Categories: Economics, Environment