What are we assessing when we measure food security? A compendium and review of current metrics.

The appropriate measurement of food security is critical for targeting food and economic aid; supporting early famine warning and global monitoring systems; evaluating nutrition, health, and development programs; and informing government policy across many sectors. This important work is complicated by the multiple approaches and tools for assessing food security. In response, we have prepared a compendium and review of food security assessment tools in which we review issues of terminology, measurement, and validation. We begin by describing the evolving definition of food security and use this discussion to frame a review of the current landscape of measurement tools available for assessing food security. We critically assess the purpose/s of these tools, the domains of food security assessed by each, the conceptualizations of food security that underpin each metric, as well as the approaches that have been used to validate these metrics. Specifically, we describe measurement tools that 1) provide national-level estimates of food security, 2) inform global monitoring and early warning systems, 3) assess household food access and acquisition, and 4) measure food consumption and utilization. After describing a number of outstanding measurement challenges that might be addressed in future research, we conclude by offering suggestions to guide the selection of appropriate food security metrics.

Modernization, weather variability, and vulnerability to famine.

This paper shows that under weather variability the transformation from a rural to an incomplete market economy can increase the vulnerability of peasants to famine. This can occur even if improvements in technology have raised agricultural productivity and made production less responsive to weather variability. Indeed, negative environmental shocks can produce a drop in wages that outweighs the increase in wages due to an equivalent positive environmental shock. Consequently, the amount of grain stored increases more slowly in good seasons than it decreases in bad ones. This paper gives new insights on the catastrophic effects produced by widespread droughts in India during the second half of the 19th century. Notwithstanding the introduction of new modes of production and the modernization of infrastructures, the interaction between environmental variability and new institutional arrangements might have contributed to increase the vulnerability of peasants to famine.

Famines past, famine's future.

Famine, like poverty, has always been with us. No region and no century has been immune. Its scars ­ economic, psychological and political ­ can long outlast its immediate impact on mortality and health. Famines are a hallmark of economic backwardness, and were thus more likely to occur in the pre-industrialized past. Yet the twentieth century suffered some of the most devastating ever recorded. That century also saw shifts in both the causes and symptoms of famine. This new century's famines have been "small" by historical standards, and the threat of major ones seemingly confined to ever-smaller pockets of the globe. Are these shifts a sign of hope for the future?

Food, feed, fuel: transforming the competition for grains.

Critical changes are underway in the domain of grain utilization. With the large-scale diversion of corn for the manufacture of ethanol, the bulk of it in the USA, there has been a transformation of the food­feed competition that emerged in the twentieth century and characterized the world's grain consumption after World War II. Concerns have already been expressed in several quarters regarding the role of corn-based ethanol in the recent food price spike and the global food crisis. In this context, this article attempts to outline the theoretical tenets of a food­feed­fuel competition in the domain of grain consumption. The study focuses on developments in the US economy from 1980 onwards, when the earliest initiatives on bio-fuel promotion were undertaken. The transformation of the erstwhile food­feed competition with the introduction of fuel as a further use for grains has caused a new dynamics of adjustments between the different uses of grains. This tilts the distribution of cereal consumption drastically against the low-income classes and poses tougher challenges in the fight against global hunger.

Feeding the family during times of stress: experience and determinants of food insecurity in an Inuit community.

This paper uses a mixed methods approach to characterise the experience of food insecurity among Inuit community members in Igloolik, Nunavut, and examine the conditions and processes that constrain access, availability, and quality of food. We conducted semi-structured interviews (n= 66) and focus groups (n= 10) with community members, and key informant interviews with local and territorial health professionals and policymakers (n= 19). The study indicates widespread experience of food insecurity. Even individuals and households who were food secure at the time of the research had experienced food insecurity in the recent past, with food insecurity largely transitory in nature. Multiple determinants of food insecurity operating over different spatial-temporal scales are identified, including food affordability and budgeting, food knowledge and preferences, food quality and availability, environmental stress, declining hunting activity, and the cost of harvesting. These determinants are operating in the context of changing livelihoods and climate change, which in many cases are exacerbating food insecurity, although high-order manifestations of food insecurity (that is, starvation) are no longer experienced.

Food security politics and the Millennium Development Goals.

This article reviews proposals regarding the recent food crisis in the context of a broader, threshold debate on the future of agriculture and food security. While the MDGs have focused on eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, the food crisis pushed the hungry over the one billion mark. There is thus a renewed focus on agricultural development, which pivots on the salience of industrial agriculture (as a supply source) in addressing food security. The World Bank's new 'agriculture for development' initiative seeks to improve small-farmer productivity with new inputs, and their incorporation into global markets via value-chains originating in industrial agriculture. An alternative claim, originating in 'food sovereignty' politics, demanding small-farmer rights to develop bio-regionally specific agro-ecological methods and provision for local, rather than global, markets, resonates in the IAASTD report, which implies agribusiness as usual ''is no longer an option'. The basic divide is over whether agriculture is a servant of economic growth, or should be developed as a foundational source of social and ecological sustainability. We review and compare these different paradigmatic approaches to food security, and their political and ecological implications.

From famine to food crisis: what history can teach us about local and global subsistence crises.

The number of famine prone regions in the world has been shrinking for centuries. It is currently mainly limited to sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the impact of endemic hunger has not declined and the early twenty-first century seems to be faced with a new threat: global subsistence crises. In this essay I question the concepts of famine and food crisis from different analytical angles: historical and contemporary famine research, food regime theory, and peasant studies. I will argue that only a more integrated historical framework of analysis can surpass dualistic interpretations grounded in Eurocentric modernization paradigms. This article successively debates historical and contemporary famine research, the contemporary food regime and the new global food crisis, the lessons from Europe's 'grand escape' from hunger, and the peasantry and 'depeasantization' as central analytical concepts. Dualistic histories of food and famine have been dominating developmentalist stories for too long. This essay shows how a blending of historical and contemporary famine research, food regime theory and new peasant studies can foster a more integrated perspective.

Food crises, food regimes and food movements: rumblings of reform or tides of transformation?

This article addresses the potential for food movements to bring about substantive changes to the current global food system. After describing the current corporate food regime, we apply Karl Polanyi's 'double-movement' thesis on capitalism to explain the regime's trends of neoliberalism and reform. Using the global food crisis as a point of departure, we introduce a comparative analytical framework for different political and social trends within the corporate food regime and global food movements, characterizing them as 'Neoliberal', 'Reformist', 'Progressive', and 'Radical', respectively, and describe each trend based on its discourse, model, and key actors, approach to the food crisis, and key documents. After a discussion of class, political permeability, and tensions within the food movements, we suggest that the current food crisis offers opportunities for strategic alliances between Progressive and Radical trends within the food movement. We conclude that while the food crisis has brought a retrenchment of neoliberalization and weak calls for reform, the worldwide growth of food movements directly and indirectly challenge the legitimacy and hegemony of the corporate food regime. Regime change will require sustained pressure from a strong global food movement, built on durable alliances between Progressive and Radical trends.

The political economy of maize production and poverty reduction in Zambia: analysis of the last 50 years.

Poverty and food security are endemic issues in much of sub-Saharan Africa. To eradicate extreme poverty and hunger in the region remains a key Millennium Development Goal. Many African governments have pursued economic reforms and agricultural policy interventions in order to accelerate economic growth that reduces poverty faster. Agricultural policy regimes in Zambia in the last 50 years (1964­2008) are examined here to better understand their likely impact on food security and poverty, with an emphasis on the political economy of maize subsidy policies. The empirical work draws on secondary sources and an evaluation of farm household data from three villages in the Kasama District of Zambia from 1986/87 and 1992/93 to estimate a two-period econometric model to examine the impact on household welfare in a pre- and post-reform period. The analysis shows that past interventions had mixed effects on enhancing the production of food crops such as maize. While such reforms were politically popular, it did not necessarily translate into household-level productivity or welfare gains in the short term. The political economy of reforms needs to respond to the inherent diversity among the poor rural and urban households. The potential of agriculture to generate a more pro-poor growth process depends on the creation of new market opportunities that most benefit the rural poor. The state should encourage private sector investments for addressing infrastructure constraints to improve market access and accelerate more pro-poor growth through renewed investments in agriculture, rural infrastructure, gender inclusion, smarter subsidies and regional food trade. However, the financing of such investments poses significant challenges. There is a need to address impediments to the effective participation of public private investors to generate more effective poverty reduction and hunger eradication programmes. This article also explores the opportunities for new public­private investments through South­South cooperation and Asia-driven growth for reducing poverty in Zambia.

Famine as agricultural catastrophe: the crisis of 1622-4 in east Lancashire.

This article argues that historians have paid insufficient attention to the agrarian roots of early modern English famines. While not dismissing the insights arising from entitlements theory, the article takes issue with recent writings that have explained the famine of 1622­3 in north-west England as an entitlements crisis. It offers new empirical evidence from an estate in east Lancashire to demonstrate the scale of the crisis in the early 1620s, using estate accounts to produce new price data and estimates of productivity. On the basis of oat tithe data, the scale of the shortfall in foodstuffs in the harvest of 1621 is demonstrated as being probably in the region of a third; that of the following year has to be inferred from price data. The evidence shows that the crisis was not limited to the arable economy, but was followed by an extensive restocking of the pastoral economy. The article therefore makes a contribution to the growing interest in weather as an exogenous factor.

From golden hills to sycamore trees: pastoral homelands and ethnic identity in Irish immigrant fiction, 1860-75.

The prose fiction that remembers the trials of starvation and eviction of the Great Famine (1845-50) often juxtaposes representations of blasted, infertile land with images of a green, idyllic Erin. Through a discussion of Mary Anne Sadlier's Bessy Conway (1861), Elizabeth Hely Walshe's Golden Hills: A Tale of the Irish Famine (1865) and John McElgun's Annie Reilly (1873), this article reveals that immigrant writers of the Famine generation often negotiate depictions of Famine-stricken wasteland with evocations of a pastoral homeland. In the case of the two Catholic novels, Bessy Conway and Annie Reilly, the pastoral becomes a point of ethnic identification through which the immigrants can recollect and reconstruct a sense of Irishness in exile. By contrast, Golden Hills, which focuses on the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, does not lament the mass exodus of afflicted Irish: the novel rather envisions emigration as a way to regenerate Ireland as locus amoenus.