Food Security

Food security is the measure of the ability ensure access to essential nutrition. It refers to a household's or country's ability to provide future physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that fulfills the dietary needs and food preferences of that household for living an active and healthy life. It measures of the resilience to the disruption of critical food supply due to various risk factors including droughts, shipping disruptions, fuel shortages, economic instability, wars, etc. Food security assessment is divided into the self-sufficiency rate (S) and external dependency rate (1-S) as this divides the largest set of risk factors. Although countries may desire a high self-sufficiency rate, this difficult to achieve especially for wealthy countries, generally due to higher regional production costs.

The World Health Organization defines three facets of food security: food availability, food access, and food use. Food availability is having available sufficient quantities of food on a consistent basis. Food access is having sufficient resources, both economic and physical, to obtain appropriate foods for a nutritious diet. Food use is the appropriate use based on knowledge of basic nutrition and care, as well as adequate water and sanitation. The FAO adds a fourth facet: the stability of the first three dimensions of food security over time.