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USAID's
Office of Food for Peace Occasional Paper No. 1 Addressing
the "In" in Food Insecurity
“To put it bluntly, the state of
food insecurity in the world is not good.” So begins the 2002 United Nations Food
and Agriculture’s Organization’s (FAO) review of global food security status and
trends. At the same time, there has been some success in reducing poverty and
malnutrition during the 1990s, and the importance of such progress should not
be underestimated. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID),
through programmatic improvements based on the 1995 Food Aid and Food Security
Policy, played an important role in these relative successes. These programmatic
improvements included: an emphasis on targeting the most food insecure countries;
a focus on enhancing agricultural productivity and improving household nutrition;
and collaboration with local and international research institutions to expand
technical capacity. However, progress in reducing food insecurity has been
very uneven across the developing world, with some countries in all regions losing
ground. And, there is evidence that the momentum for change initiated in the 1990s
has stalled and progress will likely be harder to achieve in the future. This
paper, commissioned to support the development of the Office of Food for Peace’s
new Strategic Plan, analyzes the implications of these trends in poverty and malnutrition
for USAID food security programming. The paper argues for a conceptual shift that
explicitly acknowledges the risks that constrain progress towards enhanced food
security, and addresses directly the vulnerability of food insecure households
and communities. Enhancing peoples’ resiliency to overcome shocks, building people’s
capacity to transcend food insecurity with a more durable and diverse livelihood
base, and increasing human capital will result in long-term sustainable improvements
in food security.
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