Essay On Food Insecurity

Food Insecurity

The continuous increasing demand for the food requires the rapid improvement in food production technology. In a country like Ethiopia, the economy is mainly based on agriculture and the climate conditions are isotropic, still we are not able to make full usage of agricultural resources. The main reason is the lack of rains and scarcity of the land reservoir water in some areas of the country.

The problem I address about my country is that Ethiopia is one of the countries among the third world countries facing food insecurity currently. It is believed that around 10.2 million people are getting hunger out of the total population of 100 million people. Meanwhile, UNICEF reports approximately six million children are at risk from hunger, disease, and lack of water in Ethiopia due to drought, and around 10.2 million people are in need of food aid.

Although food aid is a standard response to transitory food insecurity (e.g. drought emergencies), in Ethiopia it has become an institutionalised response to chronic food insecurity as well. Annual food aid deliveries to Ethiopia since 1980 have varied from 200,000 to 1,200,000 metric tons. The number of ‘needy’ Ethiopians between 1980 and 1995 ranged from 2.5 million (1987) to 7.85 million (1992), and in the current drought emergency it stands at 7.7 million. Food aid deliveries to Ethiopia averaged 11% of national cereals production - or 12kg per capita - between 1985 and 1995, peaking at 26% in famine years (Clay et al. 1998:393).

Ethiopia has been structurally food deficit since at least 1980. The food gap rose from 0.75 million tons in 1979/80 to 5 million tons in 1993/94, falling to 2.6 million tons in 1995/96 despite a record harvest (Befekadu and Berhanu 2000:176). Even in that year, 240,000 tons of food aids were delivered, suggesting that chronic food insecurity afflicts millions of Ethiopians in the absence of transitory production