TRENDS IN NATIONAL FOOD SECURITY AND THE IMPACT OF CLIMATE - Food Security, Food Prices and Climate Variability - page 70

the exact estimation and physical verification of maize stocks held by millers, traders
and farmers remains very difficult. There is a need to design a way of capturing grain
stock, and capacity utilization information from public and private sectors. There is
need to harmonize methodologies employed to capture production figures by the Gov-
ernment and the private sector.
(Mwila et al., 2004)
Errors in each of the non-food uses of cereal, such as use of maize in breweries and as live-
stock feed, can be significant and have a large impact on the final per capita food availability
numbers. These problems are greater in countries that are less developed and are more likely
to have food security problems. Food balance sheets only depict the amount of food that is
available, and say little about other aspects of food security.
Measuring food security is complicated since the concept has multiple dimensions and
scales. The previous chapter described FEWS NET's household and community level food
security assessment that employed a livelihood context to understand the impact of shocks.
The FAO uses a national-level food balance sheet approach to food security assessment that
is far more quantitative and less relative than livelihood analysis. Measurement approaches at
different scales capture and neglect different elements of food security, influencing prioritiza-
tion of interventions (Barrett, 2010). Although the FAO can calculate long-term trends
because of its quantitative measurement of inputs and outputs, it neglects problems of distri-
bution among a nation's citizens, where some people receive more and others less of the total
food available. National food balance sheets feed into policies that favor food aid shipments
and agricultural production strategies that may do little to ameliorate these distributional
problems, leaving the poorest and most marginalized just as food insecure as before the inter-
vention (Hertel et al ., 2007; Sahn and Stifel, 2004).
Changes in food production due to droughts, floods or other weather events affect food
availability at the national level, but also impact households and communities directly that
are not spatially homogeneous. Weather shocks can completely decimate some farmer's
fields, but leave others unharmed. Higher food prices that result can actually benefit the
farmers who still have food stocks. Livelihoods analysis and other approaches that use local-
level information can improve our understanding of the impact of localized shocks on food
security.
Trends in national food security
In its annual “State of Food Insecurity in the World” report, the FAO (2012) estimates that
approximately 12.5 percent of the global population, or 870 million people, were undernour-
ished in terms of dietary energy supply in the 2010-12 period. The FAO uses a prevalence of
undernourishment indicator, which is based on the food balance sheet approach described
above, to estimate food insecurity at the national level. The 2012 FAO report shows that the
distribution of hunger in the world has changed over the past two decades, shifting from
south Asia to Africa. Table 4.1 shows the change of the number of undernourished, as calcu-
lated by the FAO, from 1990-92 to 2010-12. Some regions have seen significant reductions
in food insecurity, while others have had less progress.
Although Sub-Saharan Africa was one of the regions where the overall numbers of
undernourished have increased instead of declined, the percent of the total population that is