Food security


Food security is the state of having reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, healthy food. The availability of food for people of any class, gender, status, ethnicity, or religion is another element of food protection. Similarly, household food security is considered to exist when all the members of a family have consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life. Food-secure individuals do not live in hunger or fear of starvation. 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. 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. 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. The World Food Summit in 1996 declared that "food should not be used as an instrument for political and economic pressure."
There are many 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. Additionally, food insecurity affects individuals with low socioeconomic status, affects the health of a population on an individual level, and causes divisions in interpersonal relationships. Food insecurity due to unemployment causes a higher rate of poverty.
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. Chronic hunger and malnutrition in childhood can lead to stunted growth of children. 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.

Definition

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".
Food insecurity, on the other hand, as defined by the United States Department of Agriculture, 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."
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." 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."
Chronic food insecurity is defined as the long-term, persistent lack of adequate food. 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 recurrence of transitory food security can make households more vulnerable to chronic food insecurity.
, the concept of food security has mostly focused on food calories rather than the quality and nutrition of food. The concept of nutrition security or nutritional security evolved as a broader concept. In 1995, it was defined as "adequate nutritional status in terms of protein, energy, vitamins, and minerals for all household members at all times."
It is also related to the concepts of nutrition education and nutritional deficiency.

Measurement

Food security can be measured by the number of calories to digest per person per day, available on a household budget. 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 and utilization/adequacy are easier to estimate and therefore more popular, accessibility remains largely elusive. The factors influencing household food accessibility are often context-specific.
FAO has developed the Food Insecurity Experience Scale 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. Since 2015, the FIES has been adopted as the basis to compile one of the indicators included in the Sustainable Development Goals monitoring framework.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Food Programme, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations Children's Fund collaborate every year to produce The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, or SOFI report.
The SOFI report measures chronic hunger using two main indicators, the Number of undernourished and the Prevalence of undernourishment. 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 2014, it has also reported the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity based on the FIES.
The report plays a critical role in tracking global progress toward Sustainable Development Goal 2, identifying emerging crises, and shaping international policy responses by providing reliable, comparable data across regions and over time.
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 project. These include:
  • Household Food Insecurity Access Scale – measures the degree of food insecurity in the household in the previous month on a discrete ordinal scale.
  • Household Dietary Diversity Scale – measures the number of different food groups consumed over a specific reference period.
  • Household Hunger Scale – measures the experience of household food deprivation based on a set of predictable reactions, captured through a survey and summarized in a scale.
  • Coping Strategies Index – assesses household behaviors and rates them based on a set of varied established behaviors on how households cope with food shortages. The methodology for this research is based on collecting data on a single question: "What do you do when you do not have enough food, and do not have enough money to buy food?"

    Prevalence

Close to 12 percent of the global population was severely food insecure in 2020, representing 928 million people -148 million more than in 2019. In 2023 prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity in Africa is nearly double the global average. 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. In 2023 28.9 percent of the global population – 2.33 billion people – were moderately or severely food insecure, meaning they did not have regular access to adequate food. These estimates include 10.7 percent of the population – or more than 864 million people – who were severely food insecure, meaning they had run out of food at times during the year and, at worst, gone an entire day or more without eating.
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.
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.
Recent editions of the SOFI report present evidence that the decades-long decline in hunger in the world, as measured by the number of undernourished, has ended. In the 2020 report, FAO used newly accessible data from China to revise the global NoU downwards to nearly 690 million, or 8.9 percent of the world population – but having recalculated the historic hunger series accordingly, it confirmed that the number of hungry people in the world, albeit lower than previously thought, had been slowly increasing since 2014. On broader measures, the SOFI report found that far more people suffered some form of food insecurity, with 3 billion or more unable to afford even the cheapest healthy diet. Nearly 2.37 billion people did not have access to adequate food in 2020 – an increase of 320 million people compared to 2019.
FAO's 2021 edition of The State of Food and Agriculture'' further estimates that an additional 1 billion people are at risk of not affording a healthy diet if a shock were to reduce their income by a third.
The 2021 edition of the SOFI report estimated the hunger excess linked to the COVID-19 pandemic at 30 million people by the end of the decade – FAO had earlier warned that even without the pandemic, the world was off track to achieve Zero Hunger or Goal 2 of the Sustainable Development Goals – it further found that already in the first year of the pandemic, the prevalence of undernourishment had increased 1.5 percentage points, reaching a level of around 9.9 percent. This is the mid-point of an estimate of 720 to 811 million people facing hunger in 2020 – as many as 161 million more than in 2019. The number had jumped by some 446 million in Africa, 57 million in Asia, and about 14 million in Latin America and the Caribbean.
At the global level, the prevalence of food insecurity at a moderate or severe level, and severe level only, is higher among women than men, magnified in rural areas.
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.