The concept of food security

Food security is defined as a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. Four dimensions of food security have been identified in line with different levels. 1) Availability - National. 2) Accessibility - Household. 3) Utilization - Individual. 4) Stability - may be considered as a time dimension that affects all the levels. All four of these dimensions must be intact for full food security. More recent developments emphasize the importance of sustainability, which may be considered as the long-term time (fifth) dimension to food security. Food security is best considered as a causal, linked pathway from production to consumption, through distribution to processing, recognized in a number of domains, rather than as four “pillars”. Food security and food insecurity are dynamic, reciprocal and time dependent and the resultant status depends on the interaction between the stresses of food insecurity and the coping strategies to deal with them. Universal indicators for measuring food security are challenging. Different indicators may be applied to different levels of food security. Measuring food security at the household level involves five categories of indicators-dietary diversity and food frequency, spending on food, consumption behaviors, experiential indicators and self-assessment measurements. Food security, nutrition and sustainability are increasingly discussed in the same context. The integration of food security as an explicit part of the sustainability agenda would go a long way towards such a goal. The final common pathway of all these efforts is towards sustainable food security and nutrition for our planet.