COMCEC Agriculture Outlook 2018
32
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 aimof 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. These
indicators are progressively revised and regarding this section, the latest set of indicators and
their data retrieved through “Suite of Food Security Indicators” were used as released by FAO
onMay 2, 2018. In this study, indicators are classified along the four dimensions of food security,
namely availability, access, utilization and stability.
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.12 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
average dietary energy supply in OIC member countries is estimated to be 23.3 percent more
than the average dietary energy demand; as compared to 15.4 percent in the period 1990-1992.
12 FAO, 2008