 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
| |||
|  | | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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.
