Food Security: Overview Of Current Situation In Selected European Countries

Food security is defined by the World food summit of 1996 as follows: „when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life”. Such definition includes several aspects; therefore, it is necessary to use multidimensional view to its investigation. This concept is based on three pillars: food availability, food access and food use. This issue is hence complex sustainable development issue closely connected to health, economic, environmental and other issues. Presented paper is focused on the food security analysis in European countries. For this purpose, are used data from Global food security index 2015 database by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and sponsored by DuPont about food security indicators. In the first part of the paper is analyzed recent development of the food security indicators in the selected European countries, then multivariate analysis is used to reduce dimension of the data. Countries were sorted into classes according their food security performance. Results suggest positive tendency in the European countries from the perspective of increasing welfare, food accessibility and its distribution. On the other side, economic development and sufficient supply of food brings another phenomenon which can significantly reduce quality of life and is connected with prevalence of obesity in most of the European states.