FOOD SECURITY AND MONITORING SYSTEMS - Food Security, Food Prices and Climate Variability - page 28

Social security or safety net programs that provide assistance to the poor include income
assistance specifically focused on meeting the needs of these individuals to ensure that they get
enoughfoodtoeat.TheUnitedStates'SupplementalNutritionAssistanceProgramor“food
stamps” is the US government's approach to reduce hunger for the US poor. Food pantries
give away groceries and shelters that provide three meals a day are also available for anyone
who shows up without regard to income or identity. Such programs provide a basic safety net
that can reduce or eliminate calorie-based malnutrition due to food access problems. Micro-
nutrient deficiencies, however, is a more challenging problem, and can be found throughout
the world, particularly in people suffering from obesity (Eckhardt, 2006).
Although problems of access are widespread, the physical lack of food occurs only very
rarely, and usually only in regions experiencing prolonged conflict such as in Somalia. Food
insecurity occurs not because there is a lack of food, but because a portion of a society cannot
access sufficient food due to a personal lack of resources (Sen, 1981). The entitlement approach
to food security includes four categories of entitlements:
• productionbased,orwhatyougrow;
• tradebased,orwhatyoubuy;
• own-laborbased,orwhatyouearn;
• transferbased,orwhatyouaregiven.
These four entitlements together ensure that all people in a society get enough to eat to avoid
starvation. The focus of entitlements is income and purchasing power that provides the ability
of all households and individuals to buy enough food to maintain health and activity level
(Pinstrup-Andersen,2009).
There are some advantages of using information on food prices instead of data on income
and entitlements to determine food access. Unlike information on a household's food con-
sumption, there are consistent, comparable observations of the price of staple foods in specific
markets around the world every month that can be used to measure relative changes in enti-
tlements. If the underlying structure of poverty and food security remains the same in a
society, but the price of food changes in a local market because of external drivers such as the
weather or changes in the international price of food or fuel, then it can be inferred that there
may be an effect on the poor households in that community (Schreiner, 2012). Direct
information of household income and food purchases are complex, take months of interviews
to obtain and years to publish and distribute (Macro, 2013). The information is available only
for very limited areas over short periods of time. As Sen (1981) points out, income and enti-
tlementsarecomplexsincemanyassetsofpoorpeoplearenotmonetizedandarebundled
together in unique ways that enable them to access food. These commodity bundles are
complex, vary across societies and locations, and are not easily measured. However, the price
of food in the market is easily measured and thus can be used as a proxy for access to food by
the poor.
Povertyplaysacriticalroleinreducingtheabilityofaregiontocreatesuficientdemand
to ensure the availability of food. Increasing food prices can impact different segments of the
population differently. There are the poor who own land and productive assets, those that
survive on wage labor, those that have a skill such as hairdressing or clothes making, and those
that work in the market (Sen, 1981). Each category of people has different characteristics that
may affect how changing food prices impact their welfare. The poor and the very poor may