COMCEC Agriculture Outlook 2016

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 efforts. 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 was released by FAO on

July 9th, 2015. In this study, indicators are classified along the four dimensions of food security

which are availability, access, utilization and stability.

In parallel to this classification, this

document has been prepared with a view to demonstrating the general picture of the state of

food security in the OIC Member Countries. Nonetheless, considering the scope of this study,

under each dimension of food security, only principle indicators are focused.

Furthermore, the Global Food Security Index which is calculated by The Economist

Intelligence Unit provides a great insight regarding the state of food security. It considers the

core issues of affordability, availability, quality and safety across a set of 109 countries in the

world. Therefore, it assesses which countries are the most and least vulnerable to food

insecurity. Therefore, in addition to FAO’s food security indicators, it is better to see the

performance of OIC Member Countries regarding the food security by drawing on the Global

Food Security Index.

Finally, food losses and waste occurred in the different stages of supply chain is a

growing problem in the world. Along with G20, many international organizations

acknowledged that

food losses and waste within the scope of enhancing the food security is a

global problem of enormous economic, environmental and societal significance. Thus, the

current situation of food losses and waste in the world and in the OIC should be examined

within the framework of increasing food security by using available data. Being aware of this

rising concern, COMCEC aims to prepare analytical studies on reducing food losses and waste

FAO, 2008

FAO, 2015b