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Food Insecurities Faced by Women and Girl
Children
(CAPSA Occasional Paper No. 2)
by Dr. Amitava Mukherjee Ph. D.
 Two
crops which have retained their importance from antiquity till today are
rice and wheat. The Green Revolution in South Asia as in other parts of
the world was primarily aimed at improving productivity of these crops
and it did give the region the fruits of modern technology: better
seeds, newer forms of fertilizers and more and newer methods of
irrigation and ultimately, in consequence, increased availability of
food. Yet millions are food insecure in South Asia. Why? Because
achieving ‘food security’ means not just ensuring that sufficient food
is available in the system, but also that everyone has economic, social,
cultural and physical access to it and that food has adequate nutritive
value.  |
This
paper is on social protection, role of social protection in food
security and the social policy challenges of ensuring access to food for
all. It starts with a discussion of the significance of social
protection in human development, followed by an examination of the
demographic trends in the context of pressures on food security related
to migration and changing dependency ratios. Migrants, both
international and internal, ethnic minorities, tribal people and “other”
discriminated groups are vulnerable to food insecurity
This paper discusses how communities associate well-being with food
security. The paper then presents a set of community responses to
prevent food insecurity or deal with it once it sets in. Because, in
some cases, communities respond to a given food insecurity situation in
more than one way, the paper also includes a few examples of integrated
community responses to deal with food insecurity. Policy conclusions are
drawn based on these experiences.
