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USAID’s
Office of Food for Peace
Occasional Paper No. 1
Addressing the “In” in Food Insecurity (2003)
“To put it bluntly, the state of food insecurity in the world is not good.” So begins the 2002 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization review of global food security status and trends. There was 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 its Food Aid and Food Security Policy Paper (1995), included an emphasis on targeting the most food insecure countries and focused on enhancing agricultural productivity, improving household nutrition, and collaborating with local and international research institutions to expand technical capacity. However, progress in reducing food insecurity has been uneven across the developing world; some countries have actually lost ground.
This paper, commissioned to support the development of USAID’s Office of Food for Peace’s 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 toward enhanced food security and directly addresses the vulnerability of food-insecure households and communities. The paper builds the case for enhancing resiliency to overcome shocks, building capacity to transcend food insecurity through a more durable and diverse livelihood base, and increasing human capital to increase the likelihood of long-term sustainable improvements in food security.
