Throughout the world there is enough food to feed every human being. Yet hunger and malnutrition persist. “Food security” – that is, access to culturally acceptable nutriments, through normal channels, in quantities sufficient for daily life and work – should be among the most basic of universal human rights. Hunger, poverty, and marginalization are caused by political and economic forces and decisions, which result in entitlement failures that undermine food security at the household level.

Having enough to eat depends upon access to at least a minimum “floor” level of the means of subsistence. In one sense, human history may be viewed as a gradual expansion of a sense of responsibility for others, which helps to secure that minimum “floor” for ever-increasing numbers of people. The concept of an entitlement to subsistence for households within one’s own clan has been accepted for ages. Such “food security” became available to citizens of Greece and Rome thousands of years ago and was extended to most Europeans beginning about 200 years ago (Kates and Millman 1990: 398–9).

In spite of this record of progress, however, hundreds of millions of people throughout the world suffer unnecessarily from hunger and malnutrition, and, although the proportion of hungry people is diminishing, their total number continues to grow. Between 1990 and 2000, the absolute number of hungry people was projected to continue to increase and then gradually decline to a level of about 3 percent of the world’s population in 2050. “In the meantime, half of the world’s women who carry the seeds of our future may be anemic, a third of the world’s children may be wasted or stunted in body or mind, and perhaps a fifth of the world’s people can never be sure of their daily bread, chapati, rice, tortilla, or ugali” (Kates and Millman 1990: 405). Today, some 1 billion children, women, and men daily confront chronic hunger and, consequently, the specters of starvation, undernutrition, deficiencies of iron, iodine, and vitamin A, and nutrient-depleting diseases (Kates 1996: 4–6).