FOOD SECURITY AND MONITORING SYSTEMS - Food Security, Food Prices and Climate Variability - page 33

Conceptual frameworks for early warning
New approaches and methodologies to understanding the causes and consequences of food
security have led to a great expansion of the monitoring tools and data collected to provide
early warning of food security crises over the past decade. These new approaches have been
developed to respond to changes in the global food system, which include information on the
globalcommoditymarketandregionalfoodtrade,energycosts,acceleratingurbanization,
climate change, changes in food stocks and improvements in the global transmission of
information. These factors have possibly led to more food insecurity but the sources of the
vulnerability are new and far more complex than the previous, resource-based problems.
Poverty,education,diseaseburdenandthemarketorientationofevenisolated,ruralfarmers
continue to be important sources of vulnerability.
The USAID FEWS NET uses the entitlement and livelihoods approach initially articulated
by Sen (1981) and further developed by the Overseas Development Institute and others in the
humanitariancommunityspeciicallyforearlywarningorganizations(Scoones,1996;Boudreau,
1998; Frankenberger, 1992; Maxwell and Frankenberger, 1992). The objective of the livelihoods
approachistoevaluatetheimpactofahazardonfoodsecurityoutcomesinanoperationalway.
FEWS NET defines livelihoods to be “the means by which households obtain and maintain
access to essential resources to ensure their immediate and long-term survival” (FEWS NET
website, accessed May 2012). Households obtain access to essential resources through a range of
factors including geography, agricultural ecology, ownership of productive assets and inter-
household relationships. The geography and agro-ecology of an area determines what people are
able to produce or grow while access to productive assets and inter-household relationships
dictate the extent to which people are capable of meeting their food and cash needs. The degree
to which households are able to maintain access depends on their capacity to withstand and
recover from price shocks that hinder regular access to food and income. The objective of the
livelihood approach in food security assessment is to estimate sources of income and expenditures
for different economic groups in the society, and linking the effect of different shocks on the
ability of each community to maintain its entitlements to minimum consumption.
The main advantage of a livelihoods-based early warning system is that it provides a contex-
tualizedperspectiveoffoodandlivelihoodsecuritywithinaregionorcountry.Havinga
nuanced understanding of the context, or how households operate in normal conditions, ana-
lysts can better gauge the impact a shock will have on household food and income access. A
livelihoods framework is essential for answering key food security questions such as, how and to
what extent have households' normal patterns of food and income access been impacted by an
event and are households likely to face food or livelihood deficits as a result? Since humanitarian
response is not meant to provide long-term development or to be a social safety net for a
country,earlywarningorganizationsneedtohaveanunderstandingof“normal”conditionsso
that their interventions may return a country to this state (Barrett and Maxwell, 2005).
FEWS NET provides livelihood information for as many countries and regions as possible
and has been developing these during the past decade. The core products for the livelihood
approach include the following:
• Alivelihoodzonemapdividesthecountryintohomogeneouszoneswithinwhich
people share broadly the same pattern of livelihood, including options for obtaining food
and income and market opportunities.