Distribution by Region

Distribution by Organisation Type, Document Type, Region and Year

Food security occurs mostly in documents published in Europe, followed by North America, Africa, Asia and MENA with comparatively smaller contributions. Overall, the top five contributors in terms of occurrences are IGO, NGO, NGO_Fed, State and RC organisations.

IGO and RC documents provide the greatest number of occurrences, primarily from general documents published in Europe. Occurrences from NGO, NGO_Fed and State were mostly obtained from activity reports published in Europe.

Food Security...

• is a

  • goal, policy objective

  • state, condition, situation

  • (global) challenge, issue, problem

  • complex, multidimensional phenomenon

  • intervention strategy

  • (long-term) intervention area

  • emergency sector

  • livelihood element

  • basic human right

  • basic service

  • development need

• is a prerequisite for

  • sustained human development

  • economic development

  • increasing local incomes

• is part of

  • poverty reduction

  • child well-being

  • resilience

  • self-reliance

  • crisis resolution

  • reconstruction efforts

• can be categorised by

  • scope: at the individual, household, local, regional, national and global levels

  • duration: in the short-, medium-, or long-term

• is measured by various indicators

  • a family's nutritional and caloric intake

  • a region's risk exposure to seasonal variation and extreme weather

  • a country's capacity to produce and store food

  • regional infrastructure, such as the quality of road networks

• has the dimensions

  • availability

  • access

  • utilization

  • stability

• can be affected by

  • market production

  • exports and imports (and the ratio between them)

  • environmental degradation

  • access to agricultural supplies

  • policy volatility

  • disease and outbreaks

• lack of food security is caused by

  • violence, conflict

  • climate change

  • extreme weather events (drought, flood, etc.)

  • poverty

  • displacement

  • low agricultural output

  • economic instability

  • high food prices

• lack of food security causes

  • displacement, migration

  • humanitarian crises

  • malnutrition, undernutrition, hunger, famine

  • vulnerability to disease and outbreaks

  • violence, conflict

  • overweight, obesity

As defined by the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, food security exists when "all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life."

The concept of food security thus evolved to rest upon four pillars:

1) Food availability: ensuring sufficient food supply whether from local production or the international market.

2) Food stability: ensuring a stable supply of food throughout the year and from one season to the next.

3) Food accessibility: ensuring that the food is available to the public at affordable prices relative to their income.

4) Food safety.

The four pillars combined mean that all people in the country should be able to obtain their essential nutritional requirements throughout the year with no risk of deprivation, regardless of whether the food is produced locally or imported.

The concept of food security can now be summed up in the notion of self-reliance, which is to say that the government should seek to supply its people's food needs from local produce supplemented by imports and that the hard currency needed to purchase such imports must derive from autonomous sources, notably exports in goods and services.

Responses with an adjusted timeframe were developed, either oriented towards immediate impact, through food distributions or cash injections to small producers, such as in Niger, the Congo Republic or Zimbabwe; or with medium term impact food security programs with the introduction of innovative agricultural techniques, trainings to agricultural groups or livelihood diversification, such as in Sudan and Kenya.

In terms of emergency food security, 200 000 livestock belonging to some 12 000 households were targeted for vaccination and some 250 of the worst affected households benefited from restocking.

Education of girls and women, which is central to our education programme, is key to any long term strategy to improve food security at the household level.

A growing body of research is demonstrating that societies with greater gender equality experience faster economic growth and benefit from higher agricultural productivity and improved food security.

As the number of countries facing food crises has risen in the past two decades, the underlying causes have become more complex. In many cases, human-induced disasters have compounded natural ones, ushering in complex and long-lasting crises. In other instances, human induced crises have been aggravated by a natural disaster. Natural disasters were the primary cause of food insecurity until the early 1990s, with human-induced crises becoming more prominent in the past decade.

The picture that emerged from the testimony of affected communities was that drought created a 'vicious circle' of food insecurity, asset depletion, environmental degradation and vulnerability to climate shocks. In sharp contrast, the DRR and food security programme delivered profound benefits to targeted communities, contributing to a 'virtuous circle' of food security, asset-building, environmental restoration and climate resilience.

With climate change now playing such a negative role on food security and nutrition, some of the initiatives undertaken in 2016, have included following up on the role of food security and agriculture in climate negotiations, particularly after food security was added in the Paris climate accords.

Availability

• share of dietary energy supply derived from cereals, roots and tubers

• average protein supply

Access

• percentage of paved roads over total roads

• gross domestic product (in purchasing power parity)

Stability

• cereal import dependency ratio

• percent of arable land equipped for irrigation

• political stability and absence of violence/terrorism

Utilization

• access to improved water sources

• prevalence of anemia among pregnant women

Through trainings, these persons learn how to interpret food security and the community’s nutrition situation by observing a series of key variables including the main sources of food and income, production activities, food prices, shortages, infant morbidity and rain levels.

The main areas of interventions have been food security, access to safe water and resilience activities.

The HLTF's advocacy consistently integrated reference to the realization of the right to food and adoption of a human rights-based approach as a part of its strategies to achieve world food and nutrition security.

Through community-based planning, the implemented projects identified, adapted and disseminated sustainable food security and livelihoods approaches appropriate to the needs and priorities of the target groups.

WASH interventions are often combined with nutrition, health, food security and shelter, such as in the response in the Philippines.

Basic human rights such as food security, health, shelter, education and family income are still major issues to be addressed.

Strengthening program quality in core sectors with an integrated women and girls focus. We will strengthen investment in technical capacity in our core sectors of WASH, food security, shelter and sexual and reproductive health (SRH)

In Ghana, we work in the most deprived and marginalised communities, empowering economically and socially disadvantaged people, especially women and children, to access their basic human rights to food security, education and economic empowerment.

In many parts of the world, protracted conflict was the primary driver of food insecurity, malnutrition and outbreaks of preventable diseases.

As two of the largest humanitarian crises in Malawi, and indeed the Southern African region, HIV/AIDS and long term Food Security are major priorities for the MRCS. Moreover, there is a clear and critical two way relationship between HIV/AIDS and food insecurity in Malawi.

Global economic crises, pandemics, food insecurity, urbanization and chronic poverty make for an increasingly complex environment for humanitarian work.

On top of that, global issues that accompany globalization (e.g., climate change, infectious diseases, conflict, food security, etc.) reach beyond national borders and are becoming ever more diversified.

CRED's estimation, based on reliable documented sources, put the figures at 610,000 deaths for the period of famine / food insecurity which was considered to last from 1995 to 2002.

Spiking prices put increased pressures on households, further increasing the risk of widespread food insecurity and ultimately famine.

More than a billion people around the world are facing food insecurity or hunger in simple terms, primarily due to poverty.

Ethiopia continues to face a complex food crisis, with ongoing food insecurity sometimes tipping over into acute hunger.

Food insecurity and malnutrition are chronic problems.

Food insecurity can exist in all countries, and it can contribute to multiple forms of malnutrition – undernutrition and micronutrient deficiencies as well as overweight and obesity.

The chart below represents the distribution of food security between 2005 and 2019 in terms of the number of occurrences and relative frequency of occurrences. It also allows you to view the distribution across Regions, Organisations and Document types.

Much of the analysis in the continuing debate over food security examines neither the root causes of hunger nor the complexities and interactions of poverty and power.

"Food insecurity'' is still being directly translated into ''food aid needs'', and the response is mainly through emergency mechanisms.

Humanitarian responses rarely establish long-term food security.

In a humanitarian crisis, food security responses should aim to meet short-term needs and reduce the need for the affected population to adopt potentially damaging coping strategies.

Narrow technocratic approach. This is a long-standing challenge – a review of food security resilience in the 1990s highlighted the prevalent mentality of ''let them eat information''.

Measuring the complexity of food security is part of a broader debate that currently takes place in the preparation process of the post-2015 development agenda.

While the IPC can help to advocate for improving data collection, monitoring, information systems, methodologies, capacity-building of analysts and other important prerequisites for food security analysis, it helps make the best use of limited data by encouraging a participatory and convergence approach to analysis. On the response side, there is a real danger that the IPC might overly focus attention on the most extreme situations of food insecurity and divert attention from developing livelihoods crises and important opportunities for risk reduction. However, this problem may be related to the overall decision-making processes, rather than a specific criticism of the IPC itself .

For instance, making even more carbohydrates available is unlikely to further improve overall food security.

It concludes that food security needs to be pursued, not in terms of absolute sovereignty in food production, a goal impractical in light of regional water scarcities, but rather in terms of sufficiency for all members of society in essential commodities.

For years, malnutrition indicators based on the prevalence of stunting, underweight or wasting among children under five years of age have been employed as the programming foundation and criterion for food aid interventions. But the prevalence of malnutrition does not necessarily reflect the level of household food security, and cannot be considered an adequate proxy indicator. This is because malnutrition is not always caused by household food insecurity... Furthermore, malnutrition is a late indicator of food insecurity because the child is malnourished by the time the problem is identified... One of the main problems with measuring household food security is the absence of a single indicator that could capture the definition of 'food-insecure households'. The definition of food security adopted at the World Food Summit in 1996 is comprehensive, but rather complex and ambiguous... This definition is not very helpful in measuring the proportion of food-insecure households because it does not include clear thresholds, and because it conflates different levels (individual, household, country and international)... Without a means to ensure comparability, the humanitarian community will continue to have difficulty making effective, efficient and accountable decisions on funding and priorities for food and other aid. This lack of comparability will also impair communications with, and advocacy to, donors and the general public on behalf of countries or populations most in need of assistance.

A major step towards eliminating hunger is to generate accurate and timely information on chronic food insecurity, its nature and causes. Most countries have national information systems on food security, but they vary widely in their coverage, analytical techniques, and in the quality and reliability of their information. To support these efforts, FAO has promoted an initiative titled Food Insecurity and Vulnerability Information and Mapping System (FIVIMS) that operates at both national and global levels. At the national level, its aims include raising awareness of food security issues, improving data quality and promoting better use of the information to drive action. At the international level, an inter-agency working group with a secretariat at FAO, Rome, helps to define common standards, methods and tools for information management and presentation.

Nutrition data availability varied from country to country and by geographic areas within countries. Most countries had conducted a national survey in the previous three to five years (except for Iraq, Madagascar, Mozambique, Somalia and South Sudan), but the aggregated values reported at national level sometimes differ greatly from values reported in the food crisis-affected areas of the country. In 2018, only seven countries conducted IPC acute malnutrition analyses, but a roll-out plan continues to expand the use of this framework to more countries. The biggest data availability challenges remain in inaccessible areas of countries where conflict and insecurity are particularly severe. It is particularly difficult to obtain reliable nutrition data for displaced populations in affected regions.

In particular, given the widespread use of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), it is common for people to request clarification regarding the relation between the number of people experiencing severe food insecurity estimated using the FIES and the number of people classified as acutely food insecure and in need of urgent action (Phase 3 or worse) in IPC reports

Famines grab headlines, but chronic food insecurity and malnutrition are more insidious, often silent, daily calamities for millions of Africans.

There is a clear divergence of views among international actors on the magnitude and intensity of the crisis. Some NGO appeals talk of millions facing imminent starvation. Other actors point to localised pockets of acute food insecurity, and are adamant that this does not constitute a famine. There seems to be a difference of view as to whether current levels of malnutrition and food insecurity are exceptional, or whether they constitute a relatively normal occurrence during the hungry season in this desperately poor country. But the fact that the present situation may be largely a consequence of chronic poverty can be no excuse for failing to respond to crisis levels of hunger and suffering. As well as inappropriate or inadequate strategies for response, there also seems to have been a lack of capacity on the part of humanitarian actors.

Resilience building has become an issue of monitoring as well as selection criterion for aid. The humanitarian principle that anyone in need must get support has thus been called into question. In humanitarian aid, the concept of resilience has thus triggered a paradigm shift. For good reason, critics had been discussing whether it made sense to separate humanitarian aid from development cooperation. The problem is that such arguments now serve to cast doubt on the entire system, as is exemplified by the EU's Action Plan for Resilience in Crisis Prone Countries. It redefines the extent of humanitarian needs and, accordingly, the entitlement to aid. The consequence is that a whole range of EU programmes that relate to risk management, disaster prevention, climate change adjustment, social protection and food security are now conflated under the cross-sectional principle of resilience. As a result, budgets can be slashed. In practice the "cross-sectional principle of resilience" means that the responsibility for managing crises is shifted onto the shoulders of those who suffer the crises.

Cuba managed to stave off a crisis by means of temporary measures such as using vacant urban lots to produce vegetables, but its food self-sufficiency rates for major grains remain low, and even as of 2014 its rates were 55% for rice, 53% for frijoles beans and 35% for corn.