Introduction
Part of the millennium development goals focus on poverty eradication, population stabilization, and supplying of all people of the world with adequate food. This aims at ensuring that living standards of the people rise and alleviate deaths related with food shortage and poverty.
Although economic crises limit the efforts of many countries in their quest to eradicate poverty, countries like China have moved a step forward and recorded great success in poverty reduction. In addition, in the pursuit of feeding citizens of many nations of the world, application of diverse measures such as increase in land productivity, proper water utilization schemes, and population stabilization to ensure food security becomes inevitable.
The most Important Points and personal feelings
The millennium development goal on poverty reduction entails the reduction of people going hungry, provision of universal primary education, reducing the number of people who cannot access clean drinking water, combating the spread of infectious diseases, and provision of healthcare services to the needy in the society. All these factors help to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor in the society.
Accessible education for all lowers poverty levels to insignificant levels. I regret the fact that, children with little or no formal education normally start life at a crippled economic state and this would mean they continue in abject poverty for the rest of their lives thus widening the gap between the rich and the poor. The World Bank supports countries with good education plans to achieve their universal primary education for all.
In the developing countries, health sector combats diseases such as diarrhea, respiratory illness, malaria, measles, and HIV AIDS, which affect many people and lead to increase in mortality rate. Prevention of these diseases would mean good health to the people and therefore, high economic productivity.
A nation with high percentage of unhealthy people is prone to suffering from poverty as sick people are less productive than healthy people are. The provision of clean drinking water, adequate food, and good waste disposal helps to alleviate disease outbreaks in the society. Prevention of infectious disease such as HIV AIDs ensures healthy life and high economic productive by all hence poverty reduction.
Falling fertility and increasing mortality rates help to shrink populations and helps to stabilize populations. Family planning methods assist in regulating women fertility whereas HIV and hunger increases mortality rates in many countries. Direct health care intervention helps in raising the literacy level of many women on family planning matters to help in regulating population sizes in many nations. Small sized populations ensure good provision of basic requirements hence reduction in poverty and hunger.
Food insecurity poses a threat to many nations of the world; however, I believe that use of different approaches has alleviated the food insecurity problem in many nations. Increase in land productivity by acquisition of more land for agricultural production and application of new farming techniques improves the land productivity for sustainable food supply.
From the readings, it is clear water, as a major resource in food production, remains a great challenge in many countries. Water shortage reduces food production and this risks food insecurity in the affected countries.
To prevent this problem, I think that adoption of irrigation skills, which help to reduce water usage as drip irrigation and sprinkler irrigations over flooding and furrowing irrigation methods would save the unbecoming problem of water shortage.
From the insights raised in the readings, I feel that the need to sustain food security in the future calls the elevation of responsibility of food production from the ministry of agriculture to the office of the head of state. Effects of other ministries affect food production for instance ministry of energy emit carbon dioxide in the air affecting crop production; therefore, all ministries need regulation to achieve food security.
Conclusion
Although economic crises affecting many nations of the world cause poverty increment and food insecurity, the pursuit to achieve the millennium development goals helps to alleviate the problem of poverty and food insecurity by the application of different approaches such as education for all, population stabilization through birth controls and increment in food production. The achievement of food security and reduced poverty levels remains justified by the appropriate application of these approaches.