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The fight against hunger and food insecurity is one of the biggest challenges global societies have been facing in the last decades. The debate around food security issues has evolved in parallel with the definition of food security itself and reflects changes in the policy priorities, often inspired by new emerging threats. In recent years, the dramatic increase in food prices, the progressive scarcity of inputs such as land and water, the increase in life expectancy in developing countries paired with evolving life-styles and with the spreading of new food-related issues such as obesity, call for a complete revision of the strategies to achieve food security.
The EU-funded FoodSecure project aims at improving our understanding of the factors currently contributing to the resilience of the food system and at inspiring new policies that can mitigate risks and uncertainties caused by economic and climatic shocks, while providing for sustainable economic growth in a context of high and volatile food prices, limited natural resources, changing consumption patterns and lifestyles. The project will provide an analysis of the effects of short-term policies, with a view to designing consistent and coherent long-term strategies with desirable consequences. Support for effective and sustainable actions will include the identification of critical pathways for technological and institutional change and for EU policies in the areas of development aid, climate change, trade, common agricultural policy and renewable energy, including sustainability criteria.
This report presents a first step of the conceptual framework which will be used in the FoodSecure project to analyse the determinants of food and nutrition security. It draws on previous research and insights to develop a broad conceptual framework. The framework addresses drivers and determinants of food and nutrition security at multiple levels of aggregation. At the individual and household level, we make a distinction between drivers that affect the food and nutrition status, and drivers that affect the stability of this status. As gender is relevant in all dimensions of food and nutrition security at this level, we discuss it as a cross-cutting determinant. At the national and international level, food prices play a major role in food and nutrition security. We therefore discuss the drivers of food supply and demand, both in the short and long run. Finally, the framework describes the channels through which both micro- and macro-level policies are related to food and nutrition security.