Food security
Food security:
This chapter looks at the origins of
the concept of chronic food insecurity, the implications for measurement, and
suggests the need for a complementary investigation into the implications for
transitory food insecurity of trade liberalization. The 2002 food crisis in
Southern Africa is used to highlight issues for further discussion.
Food security is a flexible concept as
reflected in the many attempts at definition in research and policy usage. Even
a decade ago, there were about 200 definitions in published writings whenever the concept is introduced in the title of a study or
its objectives, it is necessary to look closely to establish the explicit or
implied definition.
The continuing evolution of food
security as an operational concept in public policy has reflected the wider
recognition of the complexities of the technical and policy issues involved.
The most recent careful redefinition of food security is that negotiated in the
process of international consultation leading to the World Food Summit (WFS) in
November 1996. The contrasting definitions of food security adopted in 1974 and
1996, along with those in official FAO and World Bank documents of the
mid-1980s, are set out below with each substantive change in definition
underlined. A comparison of these definitions highlights the considerable
reconstruction of official thinking on food security that has occurred over 25
years. These statements also provide signposts to the policy analyses, which
have re-shaped our understanding of food security as a problem of international
and national responsibility.
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.
The issues of famine, hunger and food
crisis were also being extensively examined, following the events of the mid
1970s. The outcome was a redefinition of food security, which recognized that
the behaviour of potentially vulnerable and affected people was a critical
aspect.
A third, perhaps crucially important,
factor in modifying views of food security was the evidence that the technical
successes of the Green Revolution did not automatically and rapidly lead to
dramatic reductions in poverty and levels of malnutrition. These problems were
recognized as the result of lack of effective demand.
Official concepts of food security
The initial focus, reflecting the
global concerns of 1974, was on the volume and stability of food supplies. Food
security was defined in the 1974 World Food Summit as:
“availability at all times of adequate
world food supplies of basic foodstuffs to sustain a steady expansion of food
consumption and to offset fluctuations in production and prices.
In 1983, FAO expanded its concept to
include securing access by vulnerable people to available supplies, implying
that attention should be balanced between the demand and supply side of the
food security equation:
“ensuring that all people at all times
have both physical and economic access to the basic food that they need”.
In 1986, the highly influential World
Bank report “Poverty and Hunger” focused on the temporal dynamics of food
insecurity. It introduced the widely accepted distinction between chronic food
insecurity, associated with problems of continuing or structural poverty and
low incomes, and transitory food insecurity, which involved periods of
intensified pressure caused by natural disasters, economic collapse or
conflict. This concept of food security is further elaborated in terms of:
“access of all people at all times to enough
food for an active, healthy life”.
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.
The 1994 UNDP Human Development Report
promoted the construct of human security, including a number of component
aspects, of which food security was only one This concept is closely related to
the human rights perspective on development that has, in turn, influenced
discussions about food security. (The WIDER investigation into the role of
public action into combating hunger and deprivation, found no separate place
for food security as an organizing framework for action. Instead, it focused on
a wider construct of social security which has many distinct components
including, of course, health and nutrition.
The 1996 World Food Summit adopted a
still more complex definition:
“Food security, at the individual,
household, national, regional and global levels [is achieved] 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”
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”
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. 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.
Household measurements: the focus on
chronic hunger and poverty
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.This type of measurement
corresponds to the earlier narrower definitions of chronic food insecurity.
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.
The international comparison of country
estimates of chronic food insecurity therefore reflect cross-sectional patterns
and trends in food production, supplemented by what is recorded about trade in
basic foodstuffs (effectively cereals) as incorporated into national food
balance sheets. These comparisons show broad differences in food security
between the development categories of low, middle and upper income countries,
as well as considerable variance within categories.
Attempts to explain these differences
within categories, and in changes over time in the incidence of sub-nutrition,
have met with limited success. SOFI 2001 notes that groups of variables that
reflect shocks and agricultural productivity growth are significant influences
in explaining periodic differences in country performance but concludes:
“...attempts to seek one simple cause for either good or bad performance are
not very useful. The power of just a few variables to explain changes in highly
diverse, and indeed unique national situations is limited”.
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.
The problem of unreliable data on
production and unrecorded trade is unavoidable, but may be serious for many of
the most food insecure countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The current crisis in
Southern Africa highlights this issue. Malawi appears to have been one of the
twelve best-performing countries since the early 1990s in improving food
security.However, there is currently much debate about the reliability of food
production data, particularly for roots and tubers in this country. Trends for
countries in which these are important staples, especially in subsistence, and
comparisons between these and other countries are a source of ambiguity.
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.
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. However, and again the current crisis in Southern Africa
serves as a reminder, there may be significant differences between countries in
these factors and the way they are changing. The deteriorating health situation
in Southern Africa may be eroding nutritional status, not only with the
recrudescence of malaria and tuberculosis, but most evidently because of the
rapid spread of HIV/AIDS, with an incidence of 25 percent and more amongst the
economically active adult population. 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.
Policy statements on food security give
less and less prominence to transitory food insecurity and the risks of acute
food crisis. The frequently reiterated assurance that there is globally enough
food to feed everyone is supported, moreover, by the success in limiting the
impact of the Southern Africa drought crisis of 1991/92. Such considerations
may even suggest that the risk of a natural disaster, an economic shock or a
humanitarian problem resulting in a severe food crisis is diminishing. Before
accepting that comfortable conclusion, it is appropriate to re-examine the
issue of transitory food insecurity and the possible links with liberalization.
According to the World Bank, in 1986
“The major sources of transitory food insecurity are year-to-year variations in
international food prices, foreign exchange earnings, domestic food production
and household incomes. These are often related. Temporary sharp reductions in a
population’s ability to produce or purchase food and other essentials undermine
long term development and cause loss of human capital from which it takes years
to recover”
Since that report, evidence that
natural disasters and conflict have both severe short-term and persisting
long-term negative effects has accumulated. The analysis is usually restated in
terms of poverty rather than food security, as in the 2000/01 World
Development Report.
It is possible that liberalization
increases the risk of shock that precipitates a food crisis or makes populations,
at least during the transition in trade regimes, more vulnerable. International
grain markets were more volatile in the 1990s than since the crisis period of
the early 1970s. Some commentators have asked whether this volatility is
associated with regime changes linked to the Uruguay Round (UR). Tropical
commodity export prices are performing badly, apparently still following the
long-run Prebisch-Singer downward trend.
At a national level, agricultural
liberalization could also be associated with increased volatility in production
and prices. Maize yields, maize production and other agricultural products
appear to have been more volatile since around 1988/89 when there have been
considerable changes in agricultural institutions. Simple Chow tests show that
in some countries, notably Malawi and Zambia, agricultural performance was
significantly more variable in the 1990s than previously.
Other influences, such as climate
change, also affect agricultural performance. Although as yet there is no
conclusive evidence for Africa or elsewhere that climatic variability and the
occurrence of extreme events such as drought, flood and storms, have increased
significantly, nevertheless, global models suggest that such changes in
climatic variability are likely to occur. As already noted, deterioration in
the health status could make populations more vulnerable to less extreme
shocks.
It is also possible that the current
crisis in Southern Africa is the consequence of a combination of all these
developments.
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. Some elements that need
to be considered are:
- sources of dietary energy supply - taking account,
for example, of different foods, trends in the acquisition of food from
subsistence to marketing;
- climatic variability as a source of volatility and
short-term nutritional stress;
- health status, especially changes in the incidence
of communicable diseases, most obviously HIV/AIDS;
- spatial distribution within countries of poverty and
forms of food insecurity, drawing on evidence from vulnerability
assessment and mapping supported by the Food Information and Vulnerability
Mapping Systems (FIVIMS), the FAO and the World Food Programme (WFP)
interagency initiative.
It is sometimes suggested that there
should be more practical use of Sen’s entitlement theory (see Chapter 1). If
this were to involve the re-labelling of indicators of food needs as
entitlements, it would be less useful than, for example, reflecting entitlement
failure in a formal MCA.
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”.
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