Food Security a fight with hunger

Food Security a fight with hunger

Once Dr. Norman Borlaug father of modern agriculture stated that ‘’you can’t build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery’’. There are genuinely sufficient resources in the world to ensure that no one, nowhere at no time, should go hungry. If we can conquer space, we can conquer world hunger, in present world today 796 million people are malnourished means one in nine people not have access to food to live a Healthy life. According to a research hunger is a bigger problem than MALARIA, AIDS and TUBERCLOSIS combined, hunger knows no political or legislative border.  The scenario in developing countries is more painful where 12.9 percent population is undernourished, when we talk about Asian countries two third of the total population faces hunger the conditions in African countries is even adverse and intolerable.  According to WFP if woman farmer had equal access to the food as man the number of underfed people in the world could be reduced by up to 150 million. When we specifically talked about Pakistan the results are not very satisfied, just looked at the tragedy of Thar a city of Sindh Province of Pakistan after that you do not need any further explanations. In Thar people mostly borrow money to buy food items, when you borrow money you cannot feed to your children according to international standards.  In international ranking people in Pakistan are 22% undernourished, Pakistan performed poor than its neighboring countries in fight with hunger, which prevails all over the country equally.

Now Coming towards the causes of hunger, it is a vast subject to discuss and even more difficult to implies things in particular form of hunger situation in particular area, However all the factors are somewhat interact to each other’s. These are 6 major key factors which are responsible for the present shortage of food. These are 1-Poverty 2-Lack of investment in agriculture 3-Changing climatic conditions 4-War and displacement 5- Unstable market system 6- Food wastage.

How agriculture can help to reduce food insecurity?

‘’Without food all other social justice are meaningless’’.

Now here is the time to act upon, wheat is the one of most important crop which provides food to 2.5 billion people in 89 countries so through enhancing area under production of wheat we can overcome this situation more smartly.  By controlling the following key points we can provide food to humanity, while also taking environmental welfare into account:

1. By overcoming yield gap: Mostly in the world agricultural land is far away from its potential we should adopt proper agronomic practices to minimize this potential gap.
2. By increasing Fertilizer efficiency: Actually as a nature lover we are not big supporter of artificial fertilizer, however efficiency could be improve by optimizing the timing, placement, quantity and type of fertilizer.
3. By increasing water productivity: Manage present water resources and by increasing efficiency of present water Resources we can enhance agricultural productivity directly.
4. By minimizing losses of food: Through Adopting proper storage techniques, Investing in reducing post harvest losses in agriculture and by giving awareness to the people about better food storage we can minimize this problem easily.
5. By kitchen gardening: Most of in our big houses there is a empty places of no use, through growing different vegetables and fruits we can produce food with little investment for our consumption.
6. By stabilizing market system: Our farmers are disheartens by government policies he never earn enough money that he is unable to even think to reinvest in agriculture for food production, so our policies should be guarantee to give farmer reward of his work.

Conclusion:

Investment in agriculture to improve poor land conditions and manage it for better crop production by providing resistant seeds and by stabilize market system. We can overcome hunger as well as can bring peace in the world. The world will soon face critical situation in form of severe food shortage, energy crises and rising prices of food commodities in upcoming times, so we must have to reduce food losses before it leaves its mark in history. In concluding words I must mention here that some month ago FAO started a program  to organized international funds for agriculture development named as ZERO Hunger,  It can be assumed that in near future world will be hunger free and every human will have enough quality food that no one nowhere  will face hunger.

Authors:

Muhammad Shafique, Muhammad Irshad, Sajid Hanif, Azeem Akhtar

University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, Pakistan