Food Security In Developed Countries (Europe and USA) – Is It Insecurity and Insufficiency or Hunger and Poverty in Developed Countries?

Over the past several decades, poverty and hunger have been identified in less-developed countries and a lot of international funding and projects have been focused on making efforts to eradicate hunger and poverty in these populations. Therefore, the World Food Summit has been setting goals and targets, for example World Food Summit in Rome in 1996 – where commitments were made to reduce the world hunger by 2015(United Nations Department of Economics and Social Affairs, 2006) [1] by half. The first World hunger and poverty index (PHI) (Gentilini & Webb, 2008) [2], was meant to be used to track the progress of the target agreed at the 1996 world summit. However, the “World hunger and Poverty Index” was for populations in less-developed countries [1]. Most of the African, some Asian, and South American countries had low to medium hunger and poverty indices [2]. Each country’s performance was based on the proportion of population living on less than US$1/day; poverty gap ratio; share to the poorest quintile in national income or consumption; prevalence of underweight children (< 5 years of age); proportion of population undernourished [2].Whilst the indices gives data, the theory of change of hunger eradication was based on campaigns and information generating political will which is supposed to translate to policies and programmes [3] to reduce hunger and poverty and provide food security depending on the environment and availability of resources.