Enhancing long-term food security through sustainable management practices

Abstract

The given essay is dedicated to the determination of the challenges faced by governments nowadays in the process of enhancing long-term food security. The overall aim of this paper is to put everyone in the picture about the economic essence of food security and to the search of the possible ways of achieving food security through sustainable management practices. It is defined that the concept of global food security has gone through various transformations over the last few decades. As a result, there are approximately two hundreds definitions of a multidimensional term “food security” within the contemporary academic literature. The term “food security” first originated in the last decades of the XX century, when the World Food Conference defined food security in terms of food supply – assuring the availability and price stability of basic foodstuffs at the international and national level. The findings of the analysis indicate that since that period food security and the need to develop sustainable agriculture became prominent issues affecting the whole world. Considerable attention at the international and national level is given to the analysis of the food supply problems and to some degree the price stability of basic foodstuffs. The authors pointed out in the paper that the right to adequate food is an ordinary human right that is completely realized when all people in the whole world have physical and economic access at any time to adequate food, without discrimination of any kind. Finally, it is emphasized that global food requirements will continue to increase in the nearest years, as population rise and as growing incomes both an increasing volume and a changing pattern of food consumption. In that case the food needs of the each country cannot be met by local production alone. Increased domestic production supplemented by an increase in export earnings from industrial, agricultural and services exports are needed to enhance long-term food security. Therefore, it is obviously that all sectors of the economy should develop rather than think superficially about agricultural production alone meeting the food needs of the territory.