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Key terms in this Glossary:

• Food Security
• Food Insecurity
• Household food security
• Community food security
• Nutrition
• Household
• Community

Food Security

Food security 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. Household food security is the application of this concept at the family level, with individuals within households as the focus of concern.

The multi-dimensional nature of food security includes food availability, access, stability and utilization defined as:

Food Availability: The availability of sufficient quantities of food of appropriate quality, supplied through domestic production or inputs.

Food 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, economics and social arrangements of the community in which they live (including traditional rights such as access to common resources).

Food Stability: To be food secure, a population, household or individual must have access to adequate food at all times. They should not risk loosing 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.

Food Utilization: Utilization of food through adequate diet, clean water, sanitation and health care to reach a state of nutritional well-being where all physiological needs are met. This brings out the importance of non-food inputs to food security.

Food insecurity exists when people are undernourished as a result of the physical unavailability of food, their lack of social or economic access to adequate food, and/or inadequate food utilization. Food-insecure people are those individuals whose food intake falls below their minimum calorie (energy) requirements, as well as those who exhibit physical symptoms caused by energy and nutrient deficiencies resulting from an inadequate or unbalanced diet or from the body's inability to use food effectively because of infection or disease. An alternative view would define the concept of food insecurity as referring only to the consequence of inadequate consumption of nutritious food, considering the physiological utilization of food by the body as being within the domain of nutrition and health.

Food insecurity is a complex phenomenon, attributable to a range of factors that vary in importance across regions, countries and social groups, as well as over time (see Figure). These factors can be grouped in four clusters representing the following four areas of potential vulnerability:

• the socio-economic and political environment;
• the performance of the food economy;
• care practices;
• health and sanitation.

In order to achieve success, strategies to eliminate food insecurity have to tackle these underlying causes by combining the efforts of those who work in diverse sectors such as agriculture, nutrition, health, education, social welfare, economics, public works and the environment. At the national level, this means that different ministries or departments need to combine their complementary skills and efforts in order to design and implement integrated cross-sectoral initiatives which must interact and be coordinated at the policy level. At the international level, a range of specialized agencies and development organizations must work together as partners in a common effort.

Household food security depends on year round access to an adequate supply of nutritious and safe food to meet the needs of all family members. Often, the term ‘household food security’ and ‘food security’ are intermingled. While food security is defined in its most basic form as access by all people at all times to the food needed for a healthy life, the focus of household food security is on the household or family as the basic unit of activity in society. This distinction is important because activities directed towards improving household food security may be quite different from those aimed at improving food security in general. The latter often being more related to macro-level production, marketing, distribution and acquisition of food by the population as a whole.

The focus of household food security is on how people produce or acquire food throughout the year, how they store, process and preserve their food to overcome seasonal shortages or improve the quality and safety of their food supply. Household food security is also concerned with intra-household food distribution and priorities related to food production, acquisition, utilisation and consumption. It is clear that the focus is not only on the food but also on the people and households and how they give shape to their food chain and are being affected by conditions and issues emanating from higher levels such as national agricultural policies, prevailing environmental conditions, available infrastructure for marketing and distribution or even international food aid programmes. These factors are referred to as the root causes of malnutrition.

In the definition of household food security, there are a number of key words that would need further clarification to provide a better understanding of what household food security is about and how it relates to nutritional well-being. These key words include: (1) household; (2) access; (3) adequate supply; and (4) needs.

Community food security is a condition in which all community residents obtain a safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes community self-reliance and social justice. (Mike Hamm and Anne Bellows)

Six Basic Principles of Community Food Security

Community food security represents a comprehensive strategy to address many of the ills affecting our society and environment due to an unsustainable and unjust food system. Following are six basic principles of community food security:

• Low Income Food Needs
  Like the anti-hunger movement, CFS is focused on meeting the food needs of low income communities, reducing hunger and improving individual health.
• Broad Goals
  CFS addresses a broad range of problems affecting the food system, community development, and the environment such as increasing poverty and hunger, disappearing farmland and family farms, inner city supermarket redlining, rural community disintegration, rampant suburban sprawl, and air and water pollution from unsustainable food production and distribution patterns.
• Community focus
  A CFS approach seeks to build up a community's food resources to meet its own needs. These resources may include supermarkets, farmers' markets, gardens, transportation, community-based food processing ventures, and urban farms to name a few.
• Self-reliance/empowerment
  Community food security projects emphasize the need to build individuals' abilities to provide for their food needs. Community food security seeks to build upon community and individual assets, rather than focus on their deficiencies. CFS projects seek to engage community residents in all phases of project planning, implementation, and evaluation.
• Local agriculture
  A stable local agricultural base is key to a community responsive food system. Farmers need increased access to markets that pay them a decent wage for their labor, and farmland needs planning protection from suburban development. By building stronger ties between farmers and consumers, consumers gain a greater knowledge and appreciation for their food source.
• Systems-oriented
  CFS projects typically are "inter-disciplinary," crossing many boundaries and incorporating collaborations with multiple agencies.

From a scientific perspective, nutrition is an area of knowledge that is concerned with the provision of food and its utilisation in the body. The body needs nutrients for growth, development, health and general wellbeing. Often, people’s understanding of what nutrition is concerned with is limited to the visible effects of under- or over-nourishment on bodyweight and health. The relationship between nutrient intake and health status is clearly important. In the case of protein-energy malnutrition, this relationship is quite straightforward, even to the layman. The effects of specific nutrient deficiencies may be more insidious and remain hidden to the non-nutritionist as in the case of most micronutrient deficiencies.

Apart from the health-nutrition relationship, there are many other, but not necessarily less important, aspects to nutrition. These include the relationships between nutrition and: (1) physical activity, development and work capacity; (2) mental activity, development and educational performance; (3) social behaviour and cultural practices, etc.

A household may be defined as a unit of people living together, headed by a household head. This is often a man or a woman, in case there is no man. Increasingly, grandparents are taking up this role, as well as adolescents, in those households where both parents have deceased. Apart from the head of the household, there may be a spouse, children and permanent dependants like elderly parents or temporary dependants like a divorced daughter or son.

A community may be defined as a group of people living together in one place and considered as a whole especially in terms of social values and responsibilities. The group may have either an official or a customary form of administration. There are also cases where both forms co-exist. Local terminology may exist to distinguish between the two. There may be a more or less clear agreement and understanding regarding the application of customary versus statutory law and regarding the roles, responsibilities and powers of traditional versus government organisations.

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