1. FOOD SECURITY
Concepts, Basic Facts,
and Measurement Issues
June 26 to July 7, 2006
Dhaka, Bangladesh

2. Rao 1a:
The Basic Concept
and Dimensions of
Food Security
Learning: While distinguishing alternative concepts of FS
and the basic and cross-cutting dimensions of FS, the
learning goal is to achieve clarity and understanding of
these basic concepts. Trainees will have developed ready
familiarity in employing these concepts.

3. Brief Contents
• definition and meaning of food security (FS)
• food insecurity (FIS) distinguished from hunger,
under-nourishment, malnourishment and hidden
hunger and their inter-relations spelt out
• the main dimensions of FS defined and clarified
• poverty and FS: correlation and divergence
• the cross-cutting dimensions of FS
• FS at different levels & access within households
• dietary intake

4. What is Food Security?
• FAO (2008): 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 to meet
their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and
healthy life
Food security [FS] prevails if both food supply and
demand are sufficient to cover food requirements
on a continuous and stable basis
Food insecurity prevails if, at any time (occasionally,
repeatedly, or permanently), food supply and/or
demand fall short of requirements

5. Food Insecurity and Hunger,
Undernourishment, and Malnourishment
• Hunger: subjective feeling of food deprivation
over very short or long periods
• Undernourishment: <90% of minimum caloric
intake
• Malnourishment: nutritional imbalance (lack of
specific dietary components)

6. Inter-Relations
• Hunger can be felt over short time periods while being
well/under-nourished is a longer-term variable. One may
be undernourished but not feel hungry, and vice versa.
• Much undernourishment occurs at early stages of life –
the resulting disabilities can persist later even when a
person is well-fed (undernourishment without hunger)
• A well-nourished person may suffer short bouts of
hunger (hunger without undernourishment).
• But hunger & undernourishment are highly correlated, and
both are highly correlated with absolute poverty.
• Neither hunger nor poverty is quite as strongly
correlated with malnutrition as with under-nutrition.

7. Inter-Relations… [contd.]
• Since food insecurity is defined as demand or supply
deficit relative to requirements at any time, it includes ideas
of hunger (which can be occasional or endemic) as well as
undernourishment (which can be in the past or ongoing
present, and be one-shot, or repeated and permanent as is
true of most people in "absolute" poverty).
• Not only are hunger, undernourishment and poverty highly
correlated among themselves, they are also highly
correlated with food insecurity.
• Moreover, unlike hunger or poverty, food insecurity by
our definition includes both malnutrition and under-nutrition

8. The Main Dimensions of Food Security
• Production and Availability
• Physical and Social Access
• Economic Access
• Utilization and Nutrition
NOTE: Stability is a constant aspect of
each of the above dimensions

9. Main Dimensions Defined
• Physical Access at national/individual level: a
nation/individual has the ability unimpaired by any
physical barriers to get hold of food
• Social Access: an individual or household is able to
access food by one or another of political /communal
/familial /other social-institutional mechanism
• Economic Access: an individual or household is able to
access food by exercising purchasing power in markets
• Utilization/Nutrition refers to both processes and
outcomes whereby food consumed is converted into
health, nutrition and well-being

10. Necessary Clarifications
• Availability, Access & Stability are customarily taken to be the
dimensions of FS (e.g., in FIVIMS). This can be reconciled
with our conceptual definitions and dimensions as follows:
• FIRST, while “Stability” is defined with reference to time, it
is built into our 4 dimensions since our definition of FS is
independent of time (occasionally, repeatedly, or permanently).
• SECOND, Availability, Access & Stability all have both
physical and economic dimensions. Due to the great
importance of access at the individual level, we divide it
into Physical & Social Access and Economic Access.
• THIRD, the customary approach assumes utilization is
guaranteed by Access while we make no such assumption.

11. Necessary Clarifications [contd.]
• Production and Availability refers to physical and
economic availability at the national level. Econ. avail. or
supply implies phys. avail. but not vice versa e.g., air-
grown tomatoes are not physically available but deep sea
fish is. But if the fish is not harvestable, it is not supply.
• Physical access means consumers can get hold of the
food. Bread in the shop is physically accessible to a
penniless man (e.g., by stealing) but a food tray ten feet
from a rich bed-ridden woman is not.
• Social access is access via a political /communal / familial
(more generally, non-market) mechanism.
• Economic access is via the market (called demand).

12. Poverty and FIS:
Correlation and Divergence
• Most notions of “absolute” poverty are based
on or include food requirements
• So it is likely that the poor are food insecure and
the food insecure are poor
• But likelihood or probability is not necessity
• Poverty is neither necessary nor sufficient FIS
POV ≠ FIS
• Arguably, a good definition of poverty must
come close to establishing equivalence: i.e.,
POV ≈ FIS

13. CROSS-CUTTING Dimensions
of Food Security
• Governance & Institutions
• Infrastructure
• Environment
• Women and Other Disadvantaged Groups

14. Cross-Cutting Dimensions Defined
• Governance & Institutions refers to the social
arrangements that define who `owns‟ or controls the
political process by which policy goals and policy
choices are designed and implemented; its key features
include participation, transparency, monitoring,
accountability and sanctions
• Environment refers to the natural sources that provide
the material inputs including (land, space and
atmosphere) for production and living, and the natural
sinks that absorb or clear way the unwanted by-
products of production and living

15. Cross-Cutting … [contd.]
• Infrastructure comprises prerequisites of and aids to
productive activity shared across 2 or more sectors (1)
`hard' or economic (irrigation, transportation, power,
etc.); (2) `soft' or social: education, health, and safety
nets; and (3) institutional or governance: property laws,
access to resources and services, and organizations in the
delivery of various services and public goods
• Women & Other Disadvantaged Groups: special
status to chronically FIS or vulnerable groups including
women, disadvantaged regions, the disabled, the elderly,
children, ethnic minorities.

16. Food Security at
Different Levels of Analysis
• Food security at the…
– National Level
– Regional Level
– Household Level
– Individual Level
• Food security at different levels can be
independent of each other
– e.g. country can be FS at national level and FIS at
household level

17. Figure 1.1: Different Levels of Food Security

18. Access within the Household
• Household-level distribution but individual need
• Individual food intake is difficult to observe
• Unequal distribution: survival strategy (common
aim) or unequal power (conflictive relations)?
• Patriarchal versus female-headed families
• Difficulty of targeting food to specific members
• In most cases, increasing food security of the
household overall will lead to adequate diets for
the individual members

19. The Concept of Food Entitlements
• Distinguish proximate basis of food insecurity
from its ultimate causes
• For HH and individuals, "entitlements" are
proximate basis of FIS or FS
• Entitlements: ability to acquire goods & services,
through economic activity or gifts or transfer
from an external source
• Food Entitlements: ability to acquire food,
through economic activity or gifts or transfer
from an external source

20. Box 2.3: Entitlement
• What we can eat depends upon the food that we are able to acquire.
The presence of food within an economy does not entitle a person to
consume it. In each social structure, given the prevailing legal,
political, and economic arrangements, a person can establish command
over alternative commodity bundles. These bundles could be
extensive, or very limited, and what a person can consume will be
directly dependent upon what these bundles are. The set of alternative
bundles of commodities over which a person can establish such
command is referred to as this person‟s „entitlements‟.
• For example, a peasant who grows his own food is entitled to what he
has grown, adjusted for any obligations he may have (e.g. to money
lenders). He can sell, if he wants, a part of his output for cash to buy
other goods and services, and all the alternatives commodity bundles
he can acquire through these means lie within his entitlement set.
Similarly, a wage labourer‟s entitlement is given by what he can buy
with his wages.
Source: Dreze and Sen. 1989.

21. Main Types of Entitlement
• 1. Trade-based entitlement, which describes what an
individual can buy with the commodities and cash they
own.
2. Production-based entitlement, which describes the
right to own what one produces with one's own
resources.
• 3. Own-labour entitlement, which describes the sale
of one's own labour power, and the resulting trade-
based entitlements.
• 4. Inheritance and transfer entitlement, which refers
to the right to own what is willingly given by others as
remittances, gifts or bequests, as well as transfers from
the state such as social security, pensions and food
distribution.

22. Dietary Intake
• Dietary intake refers to the quantities and qualities
of foods consumed
• Dietary requirements refers to normatively defined
average quantities +qualities of foods consumed,
the norms referring to desired individual levels
of nutrition, abilities or `functionings‟
• Due to individual variations in utilization,
fulfilling dietary requirements is not the same as
achieving desired nutrition levels or functionings