Q. What is food security?
A. The term food security has been
defined and used in many ways over the past two decades,
but most definitions today describe it in terms of food
availability, access, and utilization. The World Bank
(1986) highlights the importance of access in its widely
repeated definition of food security, "access by all people
at all times to sufficient food for an active, healthy
life." Access to food derives from opportunities to produce
food directly or to exchange other commodities or services
for food. These opportunities, described by Sen (1981)
in terms of entitlement, are based in turn on access
to resources, production technologies, environmental
and market conditions, nonmarket transfers, and accumulated
food reserves. Indicators of food availability and access vary widely by region.
Two features of the World Bank's definition are particularly important.
First, access must be sufficient for activity and health. Sufficiency
is usually measured in terms of caloric intake relative to physiological
requirements for a specified period of time. (Requirements vary
with individual and environmental circumstances, but many studies
of food security use a cutoff point of 2,000 kilocalories per day—roughly
80 percent of the caloric requirements of an average adult at average
activity levels.)
Second,
access to food must be sufficient at all times. This
can be interpreted in at least two important ways. On
the one hand, access must be sufficient over the long
term, and is thus closely related to sustainable
resource use. A household can hardly be considered
food secure if it is able to meet its current nutritional
requirements only by depleting or selling its endowment
of resources. On the other hand, access to food must also
be sufficient under all possible circumstances within
any particular period of time, which raises the notion
of vulnerability.
By vulnerability, we mean the risk of exposure to shocks and the
ability to cope with shocks. All sources of access to food are subject
to variation. Food production varies with weather and other environmental
factors, for example, while access to food via exchange depends
on market factors such as wages and food prices. Access to resources
may itself be uncertain, if tenure systems are not stable and transparent.
Vulnerability may be transitory and predictable (an annual "hungry"
season), unpredictable (drought or militarized conflict), or chronic
(for landless households with insufficient employment).
A household is therefore truly food secure over a particular period
of time only if it enjoys an acceptable likelihood that it will
have sustainable access to sufficient food during that period. Most
discussions of food security by now touch on each of these elements.
By contrast, food insecurity is still generally defined simply as
a lack of access to sufficient food (World Bank, 1986), disregarding
the notions of sustainability and vulnerability altogether. In more
complete terms, a household is food insecure not if it lacks access
to sufficient food, but rather if it lacks food security—if
it does not enjoy an acceptable likelihood that it will have sustainable
access to sufficient food during a particular period of time.
ERS estimates that the share of people who do not have access to
sufficient food in 67 developing countries will decline from 34
percent in 1999 to 32 percent in 2009 (Shapouri and Rosen, 1999).
The gap between the amount of food available in these countries
and the amount needed to meet various consumption standards is largest
in sub-Saharan Africa, where population growth is relatively rapid,
commercial imports are limited by financial constraints, and production
is constrained by low levels of technology and poorly functioning
markets. ERS also estimates that although most households in the
United States are food secure, during 1996-98 some 10 million U.S.
households (9.7 percent) were food insecure (Nord, Jemison, and
Bickel, 1999).
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