Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [156]
A New Emphasis for Food Security: Safety from Bioterrorism
Prior to the terrorist attacks, food security in the United States had a relatively narrow meaning that derived from the need to establish criteria for deciding whether people were eligible to receive welfare and food assistance. In the 1980s, the U.S. government expanded its definition of “hunger” to include involuntary lack of access to food—the risk of hunger as well as the physical experience. By this definition, food security came to mean reliable access to adequate food.36
The international definition is broader, however. In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which said, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and the necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widow-hood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”37 Many interpret this provision to mean that people have a right to food security, in this case encompassing five elements: (1) reliable access to food that is not only (2) adequate in quantity and quality, but also (3) readily available, (4) culturally acceptable, and (5) safe. With respect to safety, the Geneva Convention of August 1949, an international agreement on the protection of civilians during armed conflict, expressly prohibited deliberate destruction or pollution of agriculture or of supplies of food and water. These broader meanings derived from work in international development, where it was necessary to distinguish the physical sensation of hunger (which can be temporary or voluntary), from the chronic, involuntary lack of food that results from economic inequities, resource constraints, or political disruption.38
The significance of the lack-of-access meaning of food security is evident from a health survey conducted in a remote region of Afghanistan just a few months prior to the September 2001 attacks. Not least because of decades of civil strife, Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, and its health indices are dismal: a life expectancy of 46 years (as compared to 77 years in the United States) and an infant mortality rate of 165 per 1,000 live births (as compared to 7).39 At the time of the survey, the United Nations World Food Programme estimated that 3.8 million people in Afghanistan lacked food security and therefore required food aid. Investigators examined the health consequences of this lack and found poor nutritional status to be rampant in the population and a contributing factor in nearly all of the deaths that occurred during the survey period. Half of the children showed signs of stunted growth as a result of chronic malnutrition. Scurvy (the disease resulting from severe vitamin C deficiency) alone accounted for 7% of deaths among children and adults. Because visible nutrient deficiency diseases like scurvy are late indicators of malnutrition, the investigators viewed the level of food insecurity as a humanitarian crisis—less serious than in parts of Africa, but worse than in Kosovo during its 1999 upheavals.40 After October 2001, when bombing raids led to further displacement of the population, the United Nations increased its estimate of the size of the food insecure population to 6 million and predicted that the