Global climate change is expected to increase over the next century. Human-induced global warming is likely to cause increased risk of hunger and famine, especially amongst the world's poor. Improved adaptation of food production, particularly to current climate variability, which is large, holds the key to improving food security for the global population. There is no one way to understand the food security problems of urban dwellers and no one prescription to resolve them. The noted legal scholar Philip Alston has said that the right to food is the most urgently and frequently endorsed of any basic human right but is also the most systematically violated.
Violation is almost entirely the result of the absence of enforcement mechanisms.
The World Food Summit is an occasion for revisiting commitments already made and finding practical means to make them concrete and measurable. Millions of these workers earn the lowest wages in the rural sector, lower even than the amount required to subsist. This situation exists despite rising agricultural trade and labour productivity worldwide. Working conditions are sometimes appalling and child labour is pervasive. It should nevertheless be a key ingredient in any policy that aims to reduce poverty, dependence, environmental degradation, excessive population growth and other factors that are most often the direct causes of hunger.