HOUSEHOLD FOOD SECURITY IN RUSSIA AND CHINA: COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
Providing the Earth population with sufficient amount of food became a major target of the global community in the second half of the XX century. After the Rome Declaration on World Food Security was signed at the 1996 World Food Summit, 185 countries made a commitment to reduce the number of starving people by half by 2015. This target cannot be achieved without constant monitoring and control over the changing food security of the population. Food security is evaluated at global, national and regional levels as well as at the level of individual households. Monitoring of the household food security is aimed at defining and understanding major aspects of the population wealth in terms of food consumption, as well as at determining the population groups of particularly poor living conditions. Estimation of family food security based on traditional evaluation of the income level and poverty line can give us a distorted picture. Thus, low-income families turn out to be food secure whereas wealthier families face food insufficiency, which can be caused by internal and external factors. The internal factors include unexpected changes in the circumstances that force families to use limited resources for non-food needs; the external factors include the influence sanctions on household food security. The article presents the research results on evaluation of food security of Russian and Chinese households and reviews a number of questions aimed at determining the level of economic and physical availability of food for households. The authors have also touched upon the consequences of imported food embargo for Russian households.