Analysis | Peace through food: Food security and insecurity defined

4 key components of food security

A farmer tends to his crops (Image: wilsan u/Unsplash)

As part of our New Global Commons Working Group series on emerging diplomatic challenges, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Bridging the Gap Initiative, ISD is hosting a working group this spring on the nexus between food insecurity, instability, and conflict.

Our forward-looking group of experts from government, academia, NGOs, and think tanks is discussing threats to food security, how food insecurity drives instability and conflict, how this problem may become a more significant geopolitical stress point in coming years, and how we can try to overcome these challenges. Their insights and contributions will be a critical part of ISD’s effort to produce meaningful policy principles and recommendations for all those who work on this issue.

This blog post, the second in a series on the topic, looks at some of the key terms in food security.

Food security is at the core of ISD’s spring 2021 working group. According to the 1996 World Food Summit, “food security exists 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.”[1] But, as a Wilson Center report points out, food security “encompasses not only individuals’ intakes of nutrients but also the production, processing, and marketing systems that determines its costs and shapes people’s food choices and concerns about acquiring food in the future as well as today.” [2]

Food security has four main components, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO):

• Availability: The availability of sufficient quantities of food of appropriate quality, supplied through domestic production or imports (including food aid).
• Access: Access by individuals to adequate resources (entitlements) for acquiring appropriate foods for a nutritious diet. Entitlements are defined as the set of all commodity bundles over which a person can establish command given the legal, political, economic and social arrangements of the community in which they live (including traditional rights such as access to common resources).
• Utilization: Non-food inputs also play a role in food security. Adequate diet, clean water, sanitation and health care all contribute a state of nutritional well-being where all physiological needs are met. Utilization refers to the biological ability of a person to absorb food in light of these inputs.
• Stability: To be food secure, a population, household, or individual must have access to adequate food at all times. They should not risk losing access to food as a consequence of sudden shocks (e.g. an economic or climatic crisis) or cyclical events (e.g. seasonal food insecurity). The concept of stability can therefore refer to both the availability and access dimensions of food security. [3]

Populations, groups, and individuals who do not enjoy these four elements suffer from food insecurity. “Food insecurity occurs when people’s access to the food that they produce themselves or to food in markets is disrupted, reducing the volume and quality of foods available to them; the resulting diets provide them insufficient nutrients for an active and healthy life. Food insecurity can be experienced either as a normal condition of life (chronic food insecurity) or as something more extreme (acute food insecurity).” [4]

Food loss and food waste are similarly important terms in relation to food insecurity. Food loss, according to a World Bank study, “refers to a decrease in quantity or quality (appearance, flavor, texture, and nutritional value) of food intended for human consumption.” [5] Food waste, for its part, “refers to the discarding of food appropriate for human consumption downstream in the value chain, particularly at the retail and consumer levels.” [6]

Drivers of food insecurity

The number of food insecure people globally is on the rise after decades of decline. Underlying issues in our global food system have now become apparent, as population numbers continue to increase and our food production and distribution systems have not kept apace. Food insecurity is a risk, to varying degrees, in all countries. The National Intelligence Council (NIC), for instance, assessed in 2015 that food insecurity in many countries would rise in the coming decade:

[This rise will likely be due to] production, transport, and market disruptions to local food availability, lower purchasing power, and counterproductive government policies. Demographic shifts and constraints on key inputs, such as land and water, will probably compound the risk. In some countries, declining food security will almost certainly contribute to social disruptions and political instability. Simply growing more food globally will not lead to more food-secure countries because sustainable access will remain unequal; millions lack access to land or income sources to buy sufficient food. [7]

As the McKinsey Global Institute points out, “the global food system has underlying vulnerabilities, such as high geographical concentration of production, long supply chains and high dependency of imports in some countries, especially developing ones.” [8] These vulnerabilities allow for a number of issues, both individually and collectively, to disrupt food systems and lead to food insecurity. These include climate change, environmental degradation, conflict, changes in human diets, poor governance, population displacement, and disease outbreak.

All these factors conspire to drive political instability, activate latent conflict, and propel a vicious cycle of insecurity and fragility. In the next installment, we will examine the geopolitical implications of these trends.

Sources:

1. Quoted in Emmy Simmons, “Harvesting Peace: Food Security, Conflict, and Cooperation,” Wilson Center Vol. 14 Issue 03, 2013, p. 9.
2. Ibid.
3. Food and Agricultural Association of the United Nations (FAO), “Food Security,” Policy Brief, June 2006, Issue 2.
4. Simmons, p. 9.
5. “Addressing Food Loss and Waste: A Global Problem with Local Solutions,” The World Bank.
6. Ibid.
7. National Intelligence Council, “Global Food Security,” ICA 2015–04, 22 September 2015, p. i. Emphasis added.
8. Jonathan Woetzell, Dickon Pinner, Hamid Samandari, Hauke Engel, Mekala Krishnan, Nicolas Denis, and Tilman Melzer, “Will the world’s breadbaskets become less reliable?” Case study, May 2020, McKinsey Global Institute, p. 4, https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Business%20Functions/Sustainability/Our%20Insights/Will%20the %20worlds%20breadbaskets%20become%20less%20reliable/MGI-Will-the-worlds-breadbaskets-become-less- reliable.pdf.

Read more from ISD on food security:

Analysis | Peace through food: Tackling the food insecurity and instability nexus