Understanding Food Insecurity

The second pillar of the technical concept of food security concerns both eco-
nomic and physical access to food.

Economic food access implies that households and all the individuals therein
have adequate resources to obtain appropriate food to maintain a nutritious diet.
Such access depends on the ability of households to generate the income necessary
to buy—or other resources to barter to obtain—enough food to feed the household’s
members (USAID 2012).
Therefore, considering the household level, the most important determinants of

economic food access are the wage level, employment, and prices. When house-
holds are subsistence producers, the relevant factors for economic food access are

the available productive assets and nonmarket transfers.
Physical access relates to food being accessible to everyone, everywhere. This
dimension of food security is mainly linked to infrastructure, market and storage
facilities, political stability, security and legal, cultural or religious prohibitions
(FAO-FSAU 2005). For example, religious restrictions include food taboos that
govern particular phases of the human life cycle, which may be associated with

special events such as menstrual periods, pregnancies, childbirth, lactation, prepa-
ration for the hunt, battles,