The paper benefited from comments on earlier drafts by Jacques Vercueil, David Wilcock, Margret Vidar, Ben Watkins, Leslie Lipper, Kostas Stamoulis, Jelle Bruinsma, Barbara Huddleston, Michael Wales, Bo Bengtsson and other FAO staff. Only 35 countries have set explicit goals for poverty eradication and no countries have yet enacted national legislation to reflect their reaffirmed adherence to the concept of adequate food as a human right. Possible ways of constructing such mechanisms are briefly examined. Food insecurity is the result of poor people being unable to gain access to food by producing it, buying it or being given it.
Lasting solutions are, therefore, intimately tied to the reduction of poverty.
In many situations, these may involve measures to increase production by small farmers, given the high concentration of poverty in rural areas, but more generally they depend on the improved functioning of the entire economy with growth being combined with policies which favour equity. Policies which favour more equitable income distribution are an important part of the solution. In line with such policies carefully targeted safety nets involving either food or cash transfers, ideally combined with health and education improvements, can have an immediate impact on reducing numbers of food insecure people. Although not without problems, they have the advantage of being relatively cheap, institutionally less demanding than development programmes and quick to show results in terms of the number of people better fed. In contrast, most types of investment intended to create sustainable improvements in food security through the creation of new productive assets often require substantial financial commitments per beneficiary, are still more prone to institutional failure and misuse, and take a long time to plan and still longer to generate significant food security benefits.