Food Security and Sustainable Livelihoods: The Policy Challenge

Food security

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Development. Copyright © 2001 The Society for International Development. SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), 1011-6370 (200112) 44:4; 24–28; 020144.

Food Security and Sustainable Livelihoods: The policy challenge

A NNE M . THO MSON ABSTRACT Anne M. Thomson argues that food security is now

generally recognized as an issue of household access to food rather than national food production levels. This raises issues of how to address this at the policy level. Holistic approaches to poverty reduction, livelihoods and food security are proving a challenge to operationalize, as indicated by examination of PRSPs, but are

essential to achieving food security targets set at the World Food Summit.

KEYWORDS access to food; assets approach; household food insecurity; livelihood strategies: policy making; poverty; PRSPs

The 1996 World Food Summit Declaration defines food security as ‘all people at all times have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritional food to meet dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’. This focuses on three elements of food security: availability, access and stability. Food security strategy should be based on the premise that food insecurity derives from failure of access to food rather than international or national food shortage. In this respect, perhaps the most significant conceptual achievement of the WFS was the mainstream acknowledgement that food security is not mainly or even primarily about availability of food, but about household access to food. Food security becomes an aspect of poverty, or failure of entitlements, rather than being about inadequate food production.

What does this mean for food security strategy? Where should food security issues be located in the policy arena, if they are no longer about how much food is grown, but rather about who grows the food, how commodities are traded on international markets, or ultimately how income and assets are distributed in an economy?

Sustainable livelihoods approaches

In order to address these questions, one has to identify an appropriate concep- tual framework within which to contextualize them. One such framework,

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SUSTAINABLE LIVELIHOOD FRAMEWORK

Figure 1

which has been used increasingly over the last decade, is that of sustainable livelihoods, where a livelihood is defined as comprising the capabilities, assets and activities required for a means of living (Chambers and Conway, 1992). This framework is being adopted by a number of bilateral and multi- lateral agencies and NGOs. The precise form of the analytical structure varies from agency to agency (Carney et al., 1999), but the underlying prin- ciples are similar. They are that the approach should be:

* people-centred: development as seen from the perspective of the poor;

* holistic: a cross-sectoral and multidisciplinary approach rather than a sector-specific one;

* dynamic: viewing policy and programme responses to development challenges not as blue- prints, but as learning processes with provision for mid-course corrections;

* focusing on strengths and assets: premised on the fact that the poor have answers to their prob- lems and a variety of resources they can call upon in order to respond to vulnerabilities and threats;

* achieving livelihoods that are sustainable, in economic, social, environmental and insti- tutional terms;

* emphasizing empowerment and participation, using various participatory processes that

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enable poor men and women to identify and pursue their aspirations and priorities.

Using these principles, the framework for analy- sis should contain:

* an analysis of the causes of vulnerability – shocks and stresses in the economic, social and political context, trends, seasonality, fragility of natural resources, etc.;

* an analysis of assets, at the individual, household and community level, comprising human, social, economic, physical and natural resource assets;

* the context within which livelihoods evolve – policies at both micro and macro levels; civic, economic and cultural institutions, both formal and informal; the nature of governance and its processes at all levels in society;

* livelihood strategies, including, but not restricted to, consumption, production and exchange activities;

* the resulting livelihood outcome, assessed multi- dimensionally in terms of food and other basic needs security, greater sustainability of the natural resource base, reduced vulnerability and increased income.

Figure 1 shows how one agency, the Department for International Development of the United Kingdom (DFID), links these various aspects

(Carney, 1998). 25

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This framework links the various assets of an individual household (or an individual), defined in terms of human, social, natural, physical and financial capital, through the various policies, institutions and processes which affect the returns to those assets, and the choices open to the house- hold through their livelihood strategies, to the final outcomes, one of which is defined in terms of food security.

Thus the SustainableLivelihoods (SL) framework gives an alternative way of analysing food security issues which looks at household food security both in its vulnerability context (stability in the WFS definition) but also in relationship to policy decisions.

This latter point is important. Too often in the past food security has been seen as an issue which, if addressed at the household rather than national level, could only be responded