Food security

Food security as a concept originated only in the mid-1970s, in the discussions of international food problems at a time of global food crisis. The initial focus of attention was primarily on food supply problems - of assuring the availability and to some degree the price stability of basic foodstuffs at the international and national level. That supply-side, international and institutional set of concerns reflected the changing organization of the global food economy that had precipitated the crisis. A process of international negotiation followed, leading to the World Food Conference of 1974, and a new set of institutional arrangements covering information, resources for promoting food security and forums for dialogue on policy issues^[24].

By the mid-1990s food security was recognized as a significant concern, spanning a spectrum from the individual to the global level. However, access now involved sufficient food, indicating continuing concern with protein-energy malnutrition. But the definition was broadened to incorporate food safety and also nutritional balance, reflecting concerns about food composition and minor nutrient requirements for an active and healthy life. Food preferences, socially or culturally determined, now became a consideration. The potentially high degree of context specificity implies that the concept had both lost its simplicity and was not itself a goal, but an intermediating set of actions that contribute to an active and healthy life.

This definition is again refined in The State of Food Insecurity 2001:

“Food security [is] a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”^[31].

This new emphasis on consumption, the demand side and the issues of access by vulnerable people to food, is most closely identified with the seminal study by Amartya Sen^[32]. Eschewing the use of the concept of food security, he focuses on the entitlements of individuals and households.

The international community has accepted these increasingly broad statements of common goals and implied responsibilities. But its practical response has been to focus on narrower, simpler objectives around which to organize international and national public action. The declared primary objective in international development policy discourse is increasingly the reduction and elimination of poverty. The 1996 WFS exemplified this direction of policy by making the primary objective of international action on food security halving of the number of hungry or undernourished people by 2015.

Essentially, food security can be described as a phenomenon relating to individuals. It is the nutritional status of the individual household member that is the ultimate focus, and the risk of that adequate status not being achieved or becoming undermined. The latter risk describes the vulnerability of individuals in this context. As the definitions reviewed above imply, vulnerability may occur both as a chronic and transitory phenomenon. Useful working definitions are described below.

Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. Household food security is the application of this concept to the family level, with individuals within households as the focus of concern.

Food insecurity exists when people do not have adequate physical, social or economic access to food as defined above.

Sub-nutrition, often assumed in official literature to be synonymous with the more emotive term hunger, is the result of food intake that is continuously insufficient to meet dietary energy requirements.

Measurement is typically indirect and based on food balance sheets and national income distribution and consumer expenditure data. Linking hunger and sub-nutrition with inadequate food intake allows the measurement of food insecurity in terms of the availability and apparent consumption of staple foods or energy intake^[33]. This type of measurement corresponds to the earlier narrower definitions of chronic food insecurity^[34].

Where international cross-sectional and national time series comparisons are undertaken, as in SOFI 2001, national estimates are based on average per capita availability of staple foods, or apparent consumption. The estimates may also be weighted by evidence of food expenditure by income categories for countries where consumer expenditure surveys are not available. Because poverty lines, such as those calculated by the World Bank, also reflect assumptions about dietary energy intake, there is inevitably a high degree of correlation in these cases with estimates of poverty and extreme poverty^[35].

The factors that underpin this form of statistical investigation include the association of a single dependent variable to represent chronic food insecurity, with proxy variables for differences amongst countries and changes in agricultural trade regime. However, these are not suitable for studying trade and food security.

An important intra-country gap exists in current analyses of food insecurity, which focus on national level or the individual level, as reflected either in averages derived as ratios of national aggregates or a national survey estimate. That gap is most apparent for larger countries such as Brazil, India, Nigeria or the Russian Federation. Substantial intra-country regional or zonal differences in the structure and dynamics of food security are also likely - for example, as a result of more rapid agricultural development in the Punjab and Haryana States in India or temporarily because of drought in Northern Nigeria. The trends in food security, as in poverty, may not be fully evident at a national level. Therefore, an investigation of a process such as trade liberalization that involves cross-country comparisons should be sensitive to possibly important variability within larger economies. This implies the need for regional analyses to complement country level investigations. The case study of Guatemala illustrates the intra-country dimension missing from national food security assessments^[38].

The definition of sub-nutrition includes poor absorption and/or poor biological use of nutrients consumed. The most convenient assumption for an agricultural economic analysis would be to ignore these factors. . People may become more vulnerable, and so the economy more fragile and sensitive to ever-smaller shocks. This is also a reason for reassessing the importance of transitory, acute food insecurity.

In the end it would be desirable to say, that food security is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. National and international political action seems to require the identification of simple deficits that can be the basis for setting of targets, thus necessitating the adoption of single, simplistic indicators for policy analysis. Something like the “State of global food insecurity” analysis has to be undertaken. Since food insecurity is about risks and uncertainty, the formal analysis should include both chronic sub-nutrition and transitory, acute insecurity that reflects economic and food system volatility.

Such formal exploration is usefully complemented by multi-criteria analysis (MCA) of food security. This should lead to qualitative, if not quantitative, comparisons. Where the focus of investigation is on sub-nutrition, then the linkages between sub-nutrition and inadequate food intake need to be carefully explored.

Entitlement as a construct introduces an ethical and human rights dimension into the discussion of food security. There has been a tendency to give food security a too narrow definition, little more than a proxy for chronic poverty. The opposite tendency is international committees negotiating an all-encompassing definition, which ensures that the concept is morally unimpeachable and politically acceptable, but unrealistically broad. As the philosopher, Onora O’Neill, recently noted:

“It can be mockery to tell someone they have the right to food when there is nobody with the duty to provide them with food. That is the risk with the rights rhetoric. What I like about choosing the counterpart, the active obligation of duties rather than the rights, you can’t go on and on without addressing the question who has to do what, for whom, when.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 804