Food Security : Can it be defined and calculated ?

Thankyou to those who are continuing to read my blog even as the festive period is nigh. I was encouraged by one of my readers (in the comments section) to explore the uncertainty in projections of food insecurity and the misconceptions about food security that we have today. Food insecurity seems to have become synonymous with global news today yet it is becoming a growing issue which we must address in the correct way.

To share my own personal understanding about food security, id split the main drivers into climate and non climate factors. Climate and atmosphere factors include temperature, precipitation and carbon dioxide whilst non-climatic factors range from irrigation, demography, economics and socio-politics (all of which I have touched upon throughout my blog). In terms of response methods to achieve food security it is important to look at production aspects such as crops, livestock and fish as well as non-production aspects such as incomes, transport, storage and retailing. A correct combination of the drivers and responses can achieve food security in the form of availability, access, utilization and stability.

With an abundance of drivers and response methods there is clearly not a simple remedy needed to achieve food security. A correct combination of all of these factors will go a long way to achieving “food security”. Nevertheless, this term can be understood in many ways.  Food security, as defined by the United Nations' Committee on World Food Security, “is the condition in which 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.” Antle (2015) argue that this definition of food security is non-quantifiable and hence various quantifiable factors should be used as food security indicators, including subjective feelings of hunger and objective measures of consumption or outcomes such as physical condition or health.” However, all of these pose substantial data challenges as well as measurement problems.

My aim when writing this blog post was to educate you about the various understandings of the term food security and what it’s main drivers are. Furthermore, I wanted to introduce how food security can be viewed in various ways and the difficulties involved with quantifying it.