Global food security: trends and challenges

Abstract

Food is the primary need of any human being, which is why the food security at the both national and global levels is always important. The subject of this research is the global food security. The purpose of this article is to analyze the current state of global food security, identify its main challenges and development trends of recent years. To achieve the goal of this article the author sets and solves following tasks, namely, analyzes different approaches to defining the concept of «food security» and the number of starving people in the world and in its regions for the period 2005-2021, identifies the main challenges for the world food security. General scientific methods were used to achieve the goal of research: analysis, synthesis, systematization, comparison, abstract-logical method. The results of the research show  that number of starving people both quantitatively and in percentage terms from 2005 to 2018 almost constantly decreased, and from 2019  began to grow steadily. The author notes that the largest number of starving people live in Asia, and the largest percentage of the undernourished population live in the African region. Since 2020 global food security has worsened significantly, and the main reason for this was the global COVID-19 pandemic, because of which the starving people number began to rise rapidly across the planet. The main negative impact was manifested in the population income decrease and an food prices increase. In addition, the negative consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic were also manifested in the reduction of food production, namely, the access of small producers to the necessary resources was reduced, some food products demand decreased due to the closure of public catering establishments, and also  there was a temporary suspension of exports. The author highlightes that at the beginning of 2022 a new global food security challenge appeared, it was the Russian-Ukrainian war. Due to the stopping of Ukrainian exports, record food prices were observed, which significantly worsened the access of the low-income population to food products. After the signing of the grain agreement and the resumption of Ukrainian grain exports, the situation stabilized. Conclusion: a steady deterioration of global food security has been observed since the beginning of 2020, the main cause of which was the COVID-19 pandemic, and in 2022 appeared a new challenge,  Russian-Ukrainian war.