What Is Food Security?

Food Security is a global issue AND along with Malaria prevention, it is one of the primary global issues that Peace Corps in currently focusing on. The projects that I am working on and the post that I was given are meant to be closely intertwined with the Benin Food Security program. I decided to make this month Food Security Month on my blog. This will give me a chance to talk about some of the projects I am trying to start up.. and explain to you what I am doing here (if I can figure that out myself...) ha..

What is Food Security?

In general terms, Food Security is the access and availability of balanced and nutritious food sources.

In the United States food security is often a concern in low income urban areas where we have what we call “Food Deserts” or areas where low income families have little to no access to acceptable healthy food.. (sometimes no grocery stores at all) and are in that sense forced to eat unhealthy foods (most often from fast food chains) in order to survive. In West Africa food security is different.

In West Africa it becomes an issue of not just where the food is coming from and if it is nutritious but really whether there is any food at all. For the people who live in small villages, if there is no food growing.. and no food in storage.. then there is no food. Plain and Simple. Many farmers can't farm year round because there isn't water available year round (which is an issue in and of itself)... and some seasons just aren't great for farming.. which is becoming an issue as we see the seasons shift due to climate change.

Peace Corps Benin has partnered with USAID West Africa and with a group of other West African countries (many of whom have or recently had very strong Peace Corps presence) in order to better West Africa's food security. This partnership has become known as the West African Food Security Partnership.

Our environment program here in Benin has an agricultural focus, making it easy to focus our work on food security -- we work on access and availability. However, volunteers in all sectors contribute to the food security project . Health volunteers often deal directly with nutrition by teaching mothers ways to enrich the food that children are eating, and teaching about the importance of a diverse diet – they work directly with food utilization. Any volunteer who works with a school can make a school garden, or teach lessons that contain nutritional information. Business volunteers are great for marketing fortified foods and also Moringa leaves which are highly nutritious.

The projects that volunteers area currently working on in Benin include; food diversification, food preservation (drying and/or bottling), fortified foods, irrigation, animal raising, school gardens, and nutritional education.

For the people in my commune, because of my proximity to the city, access to nutritional foods is not as big of an issue as it is in other parts of the country. However, much of the food is imported, when it could easily be grown right here. Often the local Beninese (even if they can afford it which they often can't) will not know how to cook or prepare the vegetables that are not traditionally in their diets, making their potential nutritional values irrelevant. A woman isn't going to spend the money, for example, on the expensive eggplant.. that she doesn't really know what to do with in the first place. However, if she learned to grow her own eggplant, or the eggplant didn't have to travel quite as far to the market (thus lowering the price) she might be more willing to experiment and add new additions to a diet based almost entirely around corn, fish, and tomatoes.

The current focus at the office where I work is how to market new vegetables so that it is cost effective for the women I work with to grow them AND (from my end) hopefully teach the women to eat their new products as well (baby steps). I am also working hard to start a school club and school gardens that will allow me a chance to work directly with youth and help them provide a greater variety of food to their school cafeterias. 

For most of you reading this at home, the access and availability aspects of food security are far from a problem. What does apply to you – is the utilization of these resources. Make sure you are using your knowledge, eating right, and preparing your foods with your health in mind. In the end food security falls on you, as the consumer, to feed yourself properly. Don't take for granted your ability to do so.

Z