Agriculture as a Source of Food Security

With globalization and the expansion of trade, most countries can achieve their food security objectives through enhancing their capacity to purchase food on the international market. Inside the country, when food markets work, household food insecurity is an income problem, not a problem of producing more of one's own food.

However, food markets do not always work. One situation where this happens is poor countries with no foreign exchange generation capacity outside agriculture that must rely on their own capacity to produce to achieve  food security. This includes countries such as Ethiopia, Somalia, Niger, and Rwanda that have no mineral resources to import enough food to meet national needs. It also applies to households with weak connections to markets because infrastructure is deficient, they are in very remote areas, or find themselves unemployed. These countries and households thus face the challenge of securing at least part of their food needs through their own capacity to produce. The challenge becomes quite forbidding if the country or households have very limited productive assets or find themselves under failed states and unfavorable investment climates.

Reference

Byerlee, D., (2007), Agriculture for Development: the World Bank's 2008 World Development Report