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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.
Download the paper
[132 kb]
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