According to the World Bank, “the food security is the food access by all people, at all times, to enough food for an active and healthy life”.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) goes even further:, “Food security means that food is available at all times, that all persons have means of access to it, that it is nutritionally adequate in terms of quality, quantity and variety, and that it is acceptable within the given culture”. This last, definition casts doubt whether any country, even a rich one, has ever been able to guarantee total “food security” to all its citizens.

The vast majority of hungry people are found in the third world. Hunger also hits developed countries where there is no social welfare system. In the third world, it is countries which are poorest.

Hunger is not a technical problem, nor even, with rare exceptions, a problem of total food scarcity. Food security depends much more on the distribution of land and income. The World Bank and the FAO are right in stressing the concept of access. Even in the poorest countries and those in the most heavily-affected by food crisis, its victims are not found among businessmen, armymen or among civil servants.

Hungry are the people who have no access to food, like those whose lands have been usurped by others or where no land reforms have been implemented, for instance, Pakistan. In our country, after land reforms, one person owns as much land as he can but in the name of others.

Internationally, inequalities have been galloping away over the last 15 years between the north and the south and within individual countries, reducing access to food even further. All the available indications point to even greater economic disparities in the next century.

Reports on human development by the United Nations Development Programme ( UNDP) and on trade and development by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad), show that globalization makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, may they be countries or individuals.

World cereal harvests have increased by more than 40 per cent since 1980 and are today approaching a record 2 billion tons. And yet the future of the planet’s food is not very rosy. Too many countries have systematically neglected their farmers.

Encouraged, if not forced by the structural adjustment programme of the IMF and the World Bank, they have, on the contrary, emphasized export crops. As a result, they must appeal to the world cereal markets, where barely 5 per cent of harvests are marketed.

While a country self-sufficient in cereals has nothing to fear, a country dependent on its imports, exposes its population to serious dangers. Any fluctuation in world stocks of cereals, may make prices go up and as a result, exclude millions of people from access to the wider world food market.

Another dark aspect is that even if harvests are reaching at record levels, the rate at which the population is increasing, exceeds the rates at which harvests increase. No one will be surprised that chronic hunger is still a daily reality for at least 800 million human beings. Millions of others are still far from eating enough to guarantee them an “ active, healthy life”. A good quarter of the world population is being weakened by food insecurity.

Weather the world would be able to feed its X billion people in future is virtually a meaningless question. The world is capable of feeding as many as 10 billion people as long as it is willing to pay the price, financial and political.

Everything, therefore, depends on what is meant by feeding. Is it to provide a basic calorie intake with a small amount of vegetable protein or a rich and varied meat diet?

In any case, those who have the means monopolize the available calories. Any improvement in the national income is always accompanied statistically by an increase in meat consumption. If each inhabitant of planet earth were to eat a meat-based diet, production in the next century would have to double or even treble.

What should be done? In the 1960s and 70s, it was proclaimed that the “Green Revolution” would solve all our food problems. However, the new mode of cultivation, which requires expensive inputs, often imported from abroad— irrigation, chemical fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, commercial seeds, tractors— was not affordable by poor farmers.

Moreover, the mode also destroyed bio-diversity, killed fishes in rivers, created salty soils, and polluted rivers and source of drinking water. The water-logging and salinity problem has been also the outcome of greater uses of herbicides and pesticides.

Today, a new generation of “techno- believers” are telling us with the same fervour that the future belongs to the genetically- modified organisms ( GMOs) which will miraculously feed the world.

These people are not at all concerned by the fact that a few transitional firms control these seeds and that they are not philanthropic companies. The GMOs could be caused ecological disasters even more serious than those caused by the green revolution.

Some GMO seeds are programmed to distil an herbicide little by little. Others are restraint to herbicides spread by the farmers. But farming is a complex activity.

The characteristics introduced into the GMOs can be passed on to other plants or interfere with microorganisms in the soil and create super predators or highly resistant weeds through natural selection.

Globalization has also contributed in food insecurity. The financial crises of this decade have shaken many emergent markets, ruined thousands of small and medium sized local enterprises, created massive unemployment and caused prices to rise for vital commodities.

As a result, serious food problems are recurring in different parts of the world like Mexico, Russia and in Indonesia in particular. Pakistan’s population ratio is increasing so rapidly that it will create food security problems in the years ahead. Globalization has affected Pakistan’s food problems.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) has addressed very controversial problem of agriculture, during the negotiations in Seattle in December 1999, which will also have a major impact. Few subjects raised as many passions and confrontations; on the one side are those who think that a food product should be treated in the same way as any other product.

Those countries and their companies see the future of the planet’s food along the lines of a vast global supermarket, where everyone sells what he produces better and more cheaply than his neighbour and buys everything else.

On the opposite side, the countries of Europe- including France, Japan and some of the countries of the south, refuse to put farm products and industrial products on the same footing. They stress the special nature of the agriculture: its “ multifunctionality”, which preserves biological diversity, protects the environment, keeps villages and medium sized towns alive and slows down massive rural migration.

This type of farming also means that the consumer can be in closer proximity to the producer instead of merely obtaining food products from the global supermarket. Pakistan’s food problems will aggregate in the future so Pakistan keep its food policy according to its cultural and diversified lines. Pakistan’s agriculture is dwindling; water shortage has created many problems for the growers.

Small farms and family farms, whether they are in the north or the South, could not withstand competition from the highly capitalized, major cereal producers, who could easily besiege all markets of the world by selling below the production costs of local farmers.

When all the small farmers are ruined and have left to go to the towns, there will be no guarantee that the prices of imports will not increase. For us who are able to satisfy our hunger, small-scale farming and small farms maintain both the diversity and variety of our food. What will life be like in a world that is rushing towards uniformity in food? The day when everybody will depend on the global supermarket, food will become super commodity and more insecure. Then there will be no pleasure in eating.