HEALTH AND NUTRITIONAL IMPLICATIONS FROM FOOD INSECURITY: A REVIEW

Abstract

Food insecurity is defined as “whenever the availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or the ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways is limited or uncertain” (Life Sciences Research Office, 1990). Food insecurity implies the limited ability to secure adequate food. Household food insecurity occurs when food is not available or cannot be accessed by all members in the household with certainty in terms of quality, quantity, safety and culturally acceptable ways (United Nations, 1991). In other words, households are not having enough food or money to buy food.
Food insecurity occurs in both developing and developed countries, and it is recognised as a major public health problem. In the United States, the prevalence of food insecurity was 13.2 percent (38.2 million people) in 1999 and increased to 43.0 percent by 2004 (Hall, 2005). The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (2006) in the United Kingdom estimated that 820 million people in developing countries suffer from hunger and food insecurity. Several studies in developing countries have reported the prevalence of food insecurity to be 55.8 percent among urban poor households in Thailand (Piaseu and Mitchell, 2004), 94.2 percent in East Java Indonesia (Studdert et al., 2001), 58.0 percent and 44.4 percent among households in India with and without children, respectively (Nnakwe and Yegamia, 2002). Limited studies in Malaysia reported that the percentage of food insecurity among samples of urban low-income (household income <RM 1000/month) and rural households were 67.0 percent and 58.0 percent, respectively (Zalilah, 1998; Zalilah and Ang, 2001; Zalilah and Khor, 2004).