How should a developing country improve its food security? Select a single developing country to consider?

Food Security 1
FOOD SECURITY IN YEMEN
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Food Security 2
Food Security in Yemen
I. INTRODUCTION
Food is critical to human sustenance. Through mankind’s journey, food has been front and center of major events including wars, social rituals, worship and child-bearing. The centrality of food continues to define human experience in modern history. Today, food informs major debates on security, sustainability, economic development and political stability. The combination of changing climate, growing global population, surging food prices and environmental challenges places food, however, in more risky contexts of unprecedented scale. If anything, providing more (nutritious) food for rapidly growing populations under increasingly adverse political, economic and environmental challenges has come to define food challenges as food security issues. Mainly, gaps in food production, coupled by disruptive events such as war or climate change, have made food security a major challenge in least developed countries yet, ironically, in most developed economies. True, underlying factors might defining food security challenges in developed and developing countries vary. However, current state of affairs has changed food security into a purely economic development issue in developing countries into a global challenge cutting across natural and man-made crises. For current purposes, food security in developing countries is of central interest. Specifically, food security in a selected developing country, i.e. Yemen, is explored in order to uncover underlying defining features and to offer, if possible, effective and sustainable means to reverse current dire food crisis in Yemen. II. FOOD SECURITY: CONCEPT & PRACTICE
The concept of food security has gained more attention in recent years. Understandably, rapid and radical changes in food production systems, coupled by increasingly deteriorating
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climate conditions, have put food security front and center of global discussions on sustainability
issues. The most succinct and insightful definition of food security is perhaps:
Food security, as defined by the United Nations’ Committee on World Food Security, means that all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life [emphasis added]. (“Food Security,” n.d.)
The sufficiency, safety and nutrition of food are as emphasized above, critical prerequisites in order fro any food to lead to an active and healthy life. Given current global situation, food is not only inadequately produced and distributed yet, more importantly, causes growing cases of hunger and poor health conditions. The extent food is healthy or not is, perhaps, most emphasized, in developed countries such as the United States. Despite country’s leading position economically, the United States has around 50 million people who are food insecure and, as a result, face several negative health outcomes (Gundersen & Ziliak, 2015). The state of world hunger has, moreover, been central to studies and reports made by major and leading world organizations, including World Health Organization (WHO). According to WHO’s most recent report of world food security and nutrition, The state of food security and nutrition in the world 2020: Transforming food systems for affordable healthy diets,
The food security and nutritional status of the most vulnerable population groups is likely to deteriorate further due to the health and socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic...The report puts a spotlight on diet quality as a critical link between food security and nutrition. The report also introduces new analysis of the cost and affordability of healthy diets around the world, by region and in different
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development contexts. It presents valuations of the health and climate-change costs
associated with current food consumption patterns, compared with potential impacts if
those food consumption patterns were to shift towards healthy diets that include
sustainability considerations [emphasis added]. (“Overview,” n.d.)
The vulnerability a growing number of countries is facing for different factors, including added health and socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 pandemic, provides an interesting case for analysis of historically vulnerable countries, from a food security perspective, including Yemen.
III. FOOD SECURITY IN YEMEN
For years, Yemen has experienced chronic food insecurity challenges. The combination of poor investments in agriculture, weak organizational structures, wide production of qat (a semi narcotic leaf) affecting agricultural land and, more recently, war has all made food security a constant state of affairs in a country facing world’s most acute food crisis. The World Food Program (WFP) offers a grim picture of food security in Yemen:
Even before fighting broke out in early 2015, Yemen was one of the poorest countries in the Arab world. With an average life expectancy below 64, the nation is ranked 177th out of 189 in the 2019 Human Development Index.
Over five years of conflict have left thousands of civilians dead and 3.65 million internally ...