COMCEC Agriculture Outlook 2017
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3. The State of Food Insecurity
According to the FAO, food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social
and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and
food preferences for an active and healthy life. Household food security is the application of
this concept to the family level, with individuals within households as the focus of concern.
Even though the definition of food security can be easily understood, the measurement of food
security requires much more effort. In order to tackle this issue, many experts and
international organizations have studied the concept with the aim of building a wide food
security information system. Hence, a set of indicators which aims to capture various aspects
of food insecurity was defined in September 2011 by the Committee on World Food Security
hosted at FAO headquarters. In the selection process of food security indicators, the
availability of data with sufficient coverage was taken into consideration in order to enable
comparisons across regions and over time. Therefore, several indicators which are produced
and published by different international organization are used to reveal the state of food
insecurity in the world. Regarding the state of food security, the latest set of indicators were
released by FAO on July 9th, 2015. In this study, indicators are classified along the four
dimensions of food security, namely availability, access, utilization and stability.
In addition to FAO’s Food Security Indicators, Global Food Security Index which is calculated
by The Economist Intelligence Unit is employed. This index covers the core issues of
affordability, availability, quality and safety across a set of 109 countries in the world.
3.1. Availability
According to FAO definition, availability refers to physical availability of food. It addresses the
supply side of food security and is determined by the level of food production, stock levels and
net trade.13 Therefore, the availability aspect of food security deals with whether there is
sufficient quantity of food available on a consistent basis at the household, community, country
or international level to provide food for everyone.
The availability dimension of food security can be measured by various indicators such as
average dietary energy supply adequacy, average value of food production, share of dietary
energy supply derived from cereals, roots and tubers, average protein supply, average supply
of protein of animal origin. For this study, average dietary energy supply adequacy, average
value of food production and average protein supply are taken into consideration.
Dietary Energy Supply Adequacy: Figure 25 illustrates the developments in average dietary
energy supply adequacy in the OIC member countries and the world. It is calculated as three
year averages from 1990-92 to 2014-16 to provide an index of adequacy of the food supply in
terms of calories. As it is seen in the figure, there is not a serious problem neither in the OIC
nor in the world in terms of average dietary energy supply adequacy. In the 2014-2016 period
13 FAO, 2008