Food Security and Government Intervention

All human societies must solve a set of problems related to food. The first of these is to procure edible plants and animals through some form of production process. Early humans relied mainly on hunting, fishing, and gathering all of which are still practiced in the modern world. About 10,000 years ago, certain plants and animals were domesticated giving rise to new methods to produce food. Crop production and animal husbandry generate the bulk of the food consumed in the world today. However, the products generated by farming and livestock systems around the world are of little use without resolution of a second set of problems related to the transformation of edible plants and animals into food and the distribution of this food across space and time. In traditional agricultural societies, most of the processing, storage and final food preparation is done by the farm household itself. As modern systems of agriculture have developed, the transformation of raw commodities into food and the distribution of consumable food items throughout society increasingly take place beyond the farm gate. Modern food systems rely on complex production, transportation, processing, storage, marketing and distributional components to assure the supply and distribution of food and its associated nutritional elements.