FOOD SECURITY AND MONITORING SYSTEMS - Food Security, Food Prices and Climate Variability - page 26

Causes and drivers of food insecurity
Figure 2.2 shows the cycle of governmental response and context in which production variabil-
ity caused by weather shocks occurs using boxes that are linked with arrows, connecting poverty
and high local food prices with household priorities, nutrition outcomes, adaptation, survival,
economic growth and crisis. The framework seeks to put food security problems and resulting
nutrition outcomes into the same picture as environmental and food price monitoring net-
works. Starting in the center, climate variability and anthropogenic drivers like land cover
change and land degradation effect vegetation seasonality and rainfall, which impact food pro-
duction directly and environmental change and agricultural vulnerability to weather drivers.
Local food prices are affected by food production in that season as well as long-term potential
production and other drivers such as commodity prices for food and fuel. Changes in food prices
are associated with increases in poverty due to the pressure it puts on poor households' budgets,
resulting in reduced food consumption or intake. Reduced food intake and increased food
prices results in a change of priorities in households' budgets, leading to reductions in health care
use, expenditures on education and reductions in psychological well-being. With less health
care being used and reduced food intake, changes in nutrition outcomes are likely to occur,
with increased stunting and wasting and reductions in infant birth rates in the short term.
Over decades, adaptation to scarce resources results in a falling life span, increases in mor-
bidity and mortality of the population, and reductions in cognitive outcomes due to nutrition
deficiencies in the first few years of life (Atinmo et al ., 2009, Martorell et al ., 1994). Long-
term impacts on cognitive development and energy availability for physical labor will ulti-
mately reduce the economic growth rate for the broader society (Grosh, 2008), resulting in
economic crisis, which may also be driven by external factors such as high (low) commodity
prices and agricultural inputs.
Although malnutrition is the result of widespread and persistent food security problems,
humanitarianorganizationsworktointervenebeforenutritionproblemsareevidentinthe
mostvulnerablepopulations.Foodsecurityorganizationstendtofocusonprovidinganalysis
of the availability of food in an area, and access to food by households and communities,
leavingtheutilizationfactorstothehealthcommunity.Newresearchthatlinksclimatevari-
ability more directly to changes in nutrition outcomes is increasingly important to understand
the impact of environmental change and ecosystem transformation on nutrition outcomes.
The complexity of the interactions between the elements shown in Figure 2.2 dictate that
more research is needed to enable policy development regarding the impact of climate vari-
ability on the system, and how perturbations will impact each aspect.
Food access, income and prices
Problemsofaccesstofoodoccurinallsocieties,butindevelopedcountriesthereisawide
array of formal and informal ways to provide food when an individual or household does not
have adequate income to purchase or grow it his or herself. Access to food through entitle-
ments hinges on purchasing power and the ability of the poor to convert skills or labor power
into cash that can be used to purchase food (Sen, 1981). When a large-scale crisis occurs that
reduces the ability of a particular group of people to sell their skills or labor, reducing their
income and consequently their ability to purchase food, a food security crisis can occur with
no changes in food availability.