Factsheet: Food security and children in a changing environment

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Is there enough food to feed everyone?

  • Even though the world produces enough food for everyone more than 850 million people, including 200 million children under the age of five, do not get enough food to lead normal, healthy and active lives
  • In developing countries, one out of four children are underweight
  • 13 million children under the age of five die every year from diseases exacerbated by hunger
  • Poor people simply can't afford to buy the food they need - and, while they cannot do so, it will not be grown for them

Fact: Every five seconds a child dies because she or he is hungry

  • On average people in the richest countries consume 30-40 per cent more calories than they need, while those in the poorest nations get 10 per cent less
  • Overnutrition is also becoming an issue; in 20 developing countries 5% of all children under the age of five are overweight
  • It is important not just to eat enough food but the right type of food; iodine deficiency is the single greatest cause of preventable mental retardation and vitamin A deficiency is the leading cause of preventable childhood blindness

Fact: 95% (798 million) of the undernourished are in developing countries

How does the environment impact food supplies?

  • Environmental damage is destroying the very basis of the world's food production and economic well-being - and driving the poor into even greater destitution
  • Only 8% of the Earth's soils are suitable for agriculture
  • Through over-farming, the use of too much fertilizer, deforestation, and land clearing, we have degraded much of the soil we do have

Example: environmental damage is at the root of Ethiopia's notorious famines. Since 1900, more than 90% of their forests have been cut down and, as a result, a billion tons of their topsoil is eroded every year. So harvests fail, droughts are more devastating, and hunger strikes more often

  • Water supplies are drying up, and being polluted, around the world

Fact: 77 per cent of the world's fisheries are depleted or being fished at maximum sustainable levels

  • Loss of ecosystems and wild species, whose genes are needed to safeguard and increase harvests, put our food supplies in danger
  • Farmers improve our main crops by interbreeding them with their wild relatives, gaining genes that naturally resist diseases, insect pests and environmental stresses, and make them more productive. However, wild relatives are lost as natural habitats are wiped out to make way for large-scale cultivation of foreign commercial crops
  • Crops often consist of only one variety - and so are particularly vulnerable to mass outbreaks of pests and diseases.
    • An epidemic can wipe out a genetically uniform crop across a whole continent, throwing millions into food insecurity and even famine

Fact: in the 1960s and 1970s, the grassy stunt virus killed 3 million tons of Asian rice crops, enough to have fed 9 million people for a year

What is fair trade?

  • Millions of farmers and workers in poor countries cannot get enough money to live on from the food and goods they grow and make, even though these are sold for high prices in rich nations
  • Fair trade encourages people to buy foods whose producers have been given a fair price
  • More than 130 kinds of tea, coffee, fruit, chocolate, juice, sugar and honey have the FAIRTRADE mark and are on sale in 17 countries