With the global population set to rise to nine billion by 2050, from nearly seven billion today, ensuring that food is affordable, accessible and nutritious and protecting the poor from increases in food price and climate change are key challenges for the future.
The UK government is committed to ensure that we play a significant part in ensuring food and nutrition security for all.
What is food security?
Food security exists when all people within a household have, at all times, physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs.
More simply, food security means ensuring that all people have enough nutritious food for a productive healthy life.
Our approach
The UK Government has four broad approaches to tackling food security:
- Prioritising nutrition interventions for pregnant and breastfeeding women and children from conception to two years of age. This is what is known as the critical ‘1,000 day window of opportunity’. By getting our support to children so early in their development we can prevent the nutrition related problems of one generation being passed to another through the mother and child.
- Supporting agricultural growth in developing countries because we know that this makes the greatest contribution to food security and because it has the greatest benefits for the poorest
- Providing some of the very poorest people with small amounts of cash so that they can buy the food they need from local markets, and other non-food items like fuel and medicines, or in some cases, a goat or chickens to help them build their productive potential over time and escape poverty
- Working with international partners, governments, private sector and civil society organisations to help get the right policy environment in place to stimulate growth and increase private sector investment.