Food security is the state of having reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food. The availability of food for people of any class, gender or religion is another element of food security. Similarly, household food security is considered to exist when all the members of a family, at all times, have access to enough food for an active, healthy life.[1] Individuals who are food-secure do not live in hunger or fear of starvation.[2] Food security includes resilience to future disruptions of food supply. Such a disruption could occur due to various risk factors such as droughts and floods, shipping disruptions, fuel shortages, economic instability, and wars.[3] Food insecurity is the opposite of food security: a state where there is only limited or uncertain availability of suitable food.
The concept of food security has evolved over time. The four pillars of food security include availability, access, utilization, and stability.[4] In addition, there are two more dimensions that are important: agency and sustainability. These six dimensions of food security are reinforced in conceptual and legal understandings of the right to food.[5][6] The World Food Summit in 1996 declared that "food should not be used as an instrument for political and economic pressure."[7][8]
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There are many possible causes of food insecurity. The most important ones are high food prices and disruptions in global food supplies for example due to war. There is also climate change, water scarcity, land degradation, agricultural diseases, pandemics and disease outbreaks that can all lead to food insecurity.
The effects of food insecurity can include hunger and even famines. Chronic food insecurity translates into a high degree of vulnerability to hunger and famine.[9] Human populations can respond to chronic hunger and malnutrition by decreasing the body size of children, known in medical terms as stunting or stunted growth.[10] Once stunting has occurred, improved nutritional intake after the age of about two years is unable to reverse the damage. Severe malnutrition in early childhood often leads to defects in cognitive development.[11]
Food security, as defined by the World Food Summit in 1996, is "when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life".[12][13]
Food insecurity, on the other hand, as defined by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), is a situation of "limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways."[14]
At the 1974 World Food Conference, the term food security was defined with an emphasis on supply; it was defined as the "availability at all times of adequate, nourishing, diverse, balanced and moderate world food supplies of basic foodstuffs to sustain a steady expansion of food consumption and to offset the fluctuations in production and prices."[15] Later definitions added demand and access issues to the definition. The first World Food Summit, held in 1996, stated that 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."[16][7]
Chronic (or permanent) food insecurity is defined as the long-term, persistent lack of adequate food.[17] In this case, households are constantly at risk of being unable to acquire food to meet the needs of all members. Chronic and transitory food insecurity are linked since the reoccurrence of transitory food security can make households more vulnerable to chronic food insecurity.[18]
Food security can be measured by the number of calories to digest per person per day, available on a household budget.[20][21] In general, the objective of food security indicators and measurements is to capture some or all of the main components of food security in terms of food availability, accessibility, and utilization/adequacy. While availability (production and supply) and utilization/adequacy (nutritional status/ anthropometric measurement) are easier to estimate and therefore more popular, accessibility (the ability to acquire a sufficient quantity and quality of food) remains largely elusive.[22] The factors influencing household food accessibility are often context-specific.[23]
FAO has developed the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) as a universally applicable experience-based food security measurement scale derived from the scale used in the United States. Thanks to the establishment of a global reference scale and the procedure needed to calibrate measures obtained in different countries, it is possible to use the FIES to produce cross-country comparable estimates of the prevalence of food insecurity in the population.[24] Since 2015, the FIES has been adopted as the basis to compile one of the indicators included in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) monitoring framework.[25]
The SOFI report measures chronic hunger (or undernourishment) using two main indicators, the Number of undernourished (NoU) and the Prevalence of undernourishment (PoU). Beginning in the early 2010s, FAO incorporated more complex metrics into its calculations, including estimates of food losses in retail distribution for each country and the volatility in agri-food systems. Since 2016, it has also reported the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity based on the FIES.[citation needed]
Several measurements have been developed to capture the access component of food security, with some notable examples developed by the USAID-funded Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance (FANTA) project.[23][26][27][28] These include:
Close to 12 percent of the global population was severely food insecure in 2020, representing 928 million people -148 million more than in 2019.[5] A variety of reasons lie behind the increase in hunger over the past few years. Slowdowns and downturns since the 2008-9 financial crisis have conspired to degrade social conditions, making undernourishment more prevalent. Structural imbalances and a lack of inclusive policies have combined with extreme weather events, altered environmental conditions, and the spread of pests and diseases, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, triggering stubborn cycles of poverty and hunger. In 2019, the high cost of healthy diets together with persistently high levels of income inequality put healthy diets out of reach for around 3 billion people, especially the poor, in every region of the world.[5]
Inequality in the distributions of assets, resources and income, compounded by the absence or scarcity of welfare provisions in the poorest of countries, is further undermining access to food. Nearly a tenth of the world population still lives on US$1.90 or less a day, with sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia the regions most affected.[33]
High import and export dependence ratios are meanwhile making many countries more vulnerable to external shocks. In many low-income economies, debt has swollen to levels far exceeding GDP, eroding growth prospects.
Finally, there are increasing risks to institutional stability, persistent violence, and large-scale population relocation as a consequence of the conflicts. With the majority of them being hosted in developing nations, the number of displaced individuals between 2010 and 2018 increased by 70% between 2010 and 2018 to reach 70.8 million.[34]
FAO's 2021 edition of The State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) further estimates that an additional 1 billion people (mostly in lower- and upper-middle-income countries) are at risk of not affording a healthy diet if a shock were to reduce their income by a third.[38]
In 2023, the Global Report on Food Crises revealed that acute hunger affected approximately 282 million people across 59 countries, an increase of 24 million from the previous year. This rise in food insecurity was primarily driven by conflicts, economic shocks, and extreme weather. Regions like the Gaza Strip and South Sudan were among the hardest hit, highlighting the urgent need for targeted interventions to address and mitigate global hunger effectively.[40]
One example of how this food insecurity has manifested and disproportionately affected Native American communities can be exhibited in the case of the Karuk People in Northern California. This tribe located in the Klamath River Basin is the second-largest American Indian tribe in California, and have managed the Klamath River fishery for tens of thousands of years. However, since the arrival of non-Indians in the 1850s, the region has been damaged by overfishing and habitat degradation, harming the local salmon populations that the tribe so heavily relies on. Over the period from 1917 to 1962, a series of five dams were built in the river, blocking access to 90% of the spawning habitat of the Spring Chinook, the most primary salmon run in the river. This resulted in the decline of not only these salmon populations but various other aquatic species home to the river, all of which of value and importance to the Karuk people. A reduction in fish populations and therefore fish consumption in the community inflicted suffering as well as one of the most dramatic recent dietary shifts in any North American tribe.[42]
By way of comparison, in one of the largest food producing countries in the world, the United States, approximately one out of six people are "food insecure," including 17 million children, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2009.[44] A 2012 study in the Journal of Applied Research on Children found that rates of food security varied significantly by race, class and education. In both kindergarten and third grade, 8% of the children were classified as food insecure, but only 5% of white children were food insecure, while 12% and 15% of black and Hispanic children were food insecure, respectively. In third grade, 13% of black and 11% of Hispanic children were food insecure compared to 5% of white children.[45][46] 152ee80cbc
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