IN retrospect, of the many grand-scale food security conversations that have taken place last year, few have been all-inclusive. While there are successes in terms of food security in Asia in general, these do not address the needs of the large numbers of hungry and undernourished in the region.

There are growing challenges posed by hunger and undernourishment in Asia as reflected in the inability to meet the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS) target of halving the number of undernourished people by this year. Perhaps the time has come to broaden the thinking as to who we should be having conversations with and what else we should do to establish secure and equal access to food for everyone.

The persistent existence of great numbers of hungry, undernourished people in Asia should prompt a relook at existing approaches of access to and availability of food.

…The writer is a research fellow with the Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University.