The Rome Declaration defines access to food in terms of physical access, social access and economic access.
In my 12th January Lunar Society talk, I only considered economic access (1), asking the question are we in crisis when . . .
Regarding these statements:
- These stats upon which they’re based are inevitably out of date. The latest reports are from last summer, based on data collected over previous months.
- This begs the question as to whether things have got better or worse over the last 6-12 months.
- And things will get worse: see this from the Institute of Fiscal Studies IFS on 12 January: The coat of living crunch.
- The second statement shows the food insecurity is disproportionately affecting our children most. This is particularly concerning as hunger and malnutrition when young has life-long impact on health and well-being.
- This is also UK-wide data. Food insecurity, hunger and malnutrition disproportionately affects low income households and communities.
- As, for example, in Birmingham; see this pre-Covid report Deprivation in Birmingham 2019 in which nearly half a million (490,800) co-citizens lived in the most deprived neighbourhoods, and that figures included 132,500 children.
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What % of the population need to be food insecure for us to say the UK food security is in crisis? What percentage of our children?
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(1) For more info & access to data, see the Trussell Trust State of Hunger and/or the YouGov surveys by the Food Foundation reported here
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The next blogpost in this series is Part 4: Safety, assurance & integrity — inspection, sampling & testing capacity and capability.
Previous blogposts in this Lunar Society series are:
- Part 2: Food security: How can we assess if the UK is already in crisis?
- Part 1: Pears grown in Argentina, packed in Thailand
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This is the third blogpost in the Lunar Society series, others all listed in this link: Food security: Is the UK already in crisis?