This post is written by  Ari Shaw and Bianca D.M. Wilson, The Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law.

What is Food Security?

The right to food is enshrined in international human rights law. Both the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights explicitly recognize food as an essential dimension of achieving an adequate standard of living. So critical is food security to human development that the United Nations General Assembly adopted the elimination of hunger as one of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Despite this international consensus, food insecurity — the experience of not having enough food to ensure a productive and healthy life — impacts millions of people worldwide. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 8.9 percent of the world’s population experiences hunger, with more than 250 million people on the brink of starvation. The problem is getting worse: estimates of the number of food-insecure people have grown by 60 million over the past five years.

How Does Food Insecurity Impact LGBTQI+ Persons?

While food insecurity remains a global challenge, many marginalized groups, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI+) people, face unique barriers that may make them more likely to experience food insecurity. LGBTQI+ identities and consensual same-sex conduct remain criminalized in nearly 70 countries, and in many more still, LGBTQI+ people face discrimination and stigma that can directly or indirectly lead to hunger. 

Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity/expression or sex characteristics in employment, education, healthcare, housing or other areas of life can result in social exclusion and economic precarity that leaves LGBTQI+ people without jobs, shelter or sufficient income to purchase food. LGBTQI+ people may be rejected by family or friends, or excluded from other sources of social and economic support that similarly impacts their ability to secure adequate and nutritious food. Additionally, in cases of food scarcity, selective or discriminatory rationing within families or communities may disproportionately disadvantage LGBTQI+ people. In some instances, LGBTQI+ people may fear discrimination by religiously affiliated development practitioners or service providers that run food banks or other assistance programs. 

More Data are Needed to Fully Understand the Challenge

A comprehensive understanding of how food insecurity impacts LGBTQI+ people is limited by the lack of systematic data collected on LGBTQI+ populations globally. Indeed, most national statistic offices do not include measures of sexual orientation, gender identity/expression or intersex status in data collection.

Nevertheless, previous research by the Williams Institute, which has looked directly at the issue of food insecurity among LGBT people in the United States, provides some insight into the scope of the challenge. These survey and interview studies have shown that nearly 30% of LGBT people reported not having enough to eat at some point in the past year, and 13% did not have enough to eat in the last week. These LGBT rates of food insecurity were at a higher rate than what has been found for non-LGBT people in the United States, and the highest amount of food insecurity among LGBT people was experienced by racial minorities. 

Williams Institute research has also demonstrated that LGBT people in the United States experience many of the barriers to getting services to address hunger that are likely prevalent globally — discrimination from employment and housing as well as bias experienced at religiously affiliated charitable food service organizations. Other challenges noted by many LGBT people in the United States in a large-scale qualitative study that are also likely shared with non-LGBT people are the ways having limited transportation and unstable housing impact their ability to obtain, store and prepare foods they get from services programs. Interviews with low-income LGBT people also indicated that there were additional worries about how to get food safely and how to get enough for parents and for older adults.

With the adoption of the 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals, United Nations member states pledged to ensure that all people — including LGBTQI+ people — benefit from development efforts and are able to fulfill their potential as human beings. The eradication of poverty is inextricably linked to the ability to access secure and adequate food. However, states cannot ensure that LGBTQI+ people are fully included in development without high-quality, disaggregated data to illuminate whether food security challenges have been addressed across all the subpopulations. In particular, no studies exist on hunger and food insecurity among those who are intersex or have diverse sex characteristics, so it is unclear whether the issues reported from studies of LGBT people are similar or different for all LGBTQI+ individuals. More data collection about sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, and intersex status are needed to better track food security levels and to evaluate the impact of service and policy interventions among LGBTQI+ people. 

Ari Shaw, Ph.D., is a Senior Fellow and the Director of International Programs at the Williams Institute, specializing in international human rights, LGBTI politics, and U.S. foreign policy. He was previously on the senior staff at Columbia World Projects and has worked on human rights, global governance, and LGBTI issues for the Open Society Foundations, the Gill Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the United Nations Association of the USA, among others. Shaw was a visiting researcher at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He was also a Multirights Fellow at the Norwegian Centre on Human Rights in Oslo. Shaw holds a Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University, an M.Sc. in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a B.A. in government from Harvard College.

Bianca D.M. Wilson, Ph.D., is the Rabbi Zacky Senior Scholar of Public Policy at the Williams Institute. Her research focuses primarily on system-involved LGBTQ youth, LGBT poverty, and sexual health among queer women. In addition to multiple peer-reviewed and institution-published reports, she co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies that featured a multidisciplinary collection of work on health and other topics from the perspectives of Black Lesbians in the U.S., Caribbean, and South Africa. Wilson earned a doctorate in Psychology from the Community and Prevention Research program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) with a minor in Statistics, Methods, and Measurement, and received postdoctoral training at the UCSF Institute for Health Policy Studies and the UCSF Lesbian Health and Research Center through an Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ) postdoctoral fellowship.