Alongside a safe water supply, food is an absolute necessity for human survival for more than a very short period. There is no possibility of talking about a livelihood without detailed consideration of how people will have sufficient food to eat on a regular basis.

The most commonly used definition of food security is that developed at the World Food Summit of 1996. According to this definition food security is 'a situation when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life'. This is a complex definition and once it is broken down into its component parts a wide range of human economic activity, social structures and systems are revealed within its ambit. Novib (2001) provides a useful adaptation and initial deconstruction (Table 1).

Table 1: Definition of food security and all aspects involved

Source: Novib 2001, p.8

From the above it is clear that food security as a concept covers a wide range of areas. The concept cuts across the physical supply and availability of food, the macro and micro social systems that determine entitlements to food, nutritional value and the capacity of the body to use food and others. At a macro level food security must take into consideration marketing, trade and information systems. A common way of combining all these areas is to consider food security from the points of view of availability, access and utilisation.

Availability refers to whether food is physically available. Is enough food being produced to meet needs? If sufficient food is available at a higher level (say national) are distribution systems in place to deliver to local areas? How stable is the supply of food? For example, does availability rise and fall with the seasons or is there a constant supply to meet needs? Is the available food enough to meet daily requirements at individual, household and community level with reserves to withstand shocks? Production and distribution systems are central to availability.

Access to food is dependent on availability but goes beyond it by identifying whether a specific individual, household, locality or higher level is able to gain access to the food that is available. A central issue here is how food is procured. There are two basic ways to get food - either produce it yourself or exchange something else for it. The main form of exchange in a capitalist economy is through the medium of money, but this is by no means the only possible exchange. Especially in parts of the society that have limited access to financial resources, other means of exchange may be common in accessing food.

Access is probably the key issue when discussing food security. On a global scale there is enough food produced to meet the needs of everybody in the world. But not everybody has access to food, either because they do not have the resources to produce enough food for themselves - lack of land, genetic resources, water, tools or skills to produce or because they lack financial resources or other assets that can be liquidated to purchase food. Food security for the vast majority of the urbanised population is totally reliant on their capacity to generate income to buy food. In rural areas of Africa the situation varies. In South Africa very few people produce all their food needs for themselves. Even commercial farmers produce commodities (that happen to be food commodities) in exchange for money that they use to buy food for themselves. In other countries in southern Africa there is a large peasant base that produces most if its own food - even though this is seldom sufficient from a nutritional viewpoint.

Access to food therefore has two clearly defined components to it. On the one hand, improving access to food requires an intervention that boosts agricultural productivity. On the other hand, strategies to expand employment and the realisation of reasonable cash incomes can also improve access to food in the context of sufficient availability. The two are connected when agricultural production is used both for household consumption and for sale for cash. While an emphasis on employment may seem the most logical way to proceed, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen (1981, 5) argues that 'fixed money wage may offer no security at all in a situation of sharply varying food prices (even when employment is guaranteed). In contrast, a share of the food output does have some security advantage in terms of exchange entitlement.'

Food markets and trade play a role both in issues of availability of food and access to food. Apart from the obvious issues of distributing food through the market to places where it is needed (matching supply and demand), there is a centrally important issue of what happens to people who are not catered for by the market. Since trade itself is based on the market, food will only flow to areas where there is an effective demand i.e. where people can actually buy the food at prevailing rates. These issues are dealt with in a bit more detail below.

Support to households to produce their own food using land, water, physical and human resources is the first line of defence against food insecurity. Work done by CARE International in Lesotho on the Livelihoods Recovery through Agriculture Programme (LRAP) has demonstrated that there can be a dramatic reduction in food insecurity at the household level by supporting food production for household consumption. The second line of defence against food insecurity is in up-scaling household food production by linking it with marketing systems that can absorb surpluses from household gardens to ensure a source of cash to producing households and to promote redistribution of such surpluses to food deficit households.

There are a number of key issues that can be highlighted regarding support for production. The type of agricultural production model envisioned at the start of an intervention is crucial for the direction that will be followed and its success or failure. Central to this is the question of production for household consumption versus generating cash from production. It is clear that a balance must be struck between them. This operates even at a macro level where generally trade is put forward as the primary driving force of production decisions - especially since the advent of structural adjustment that sought to use agriculture as a generator of foreign exchange. An alternative and more sustainable approach is to see smallholder food production as prioritising household and local consumption followed by (rather than driven by) trade in surpluses. A question raised earlier was whether agriculture should be just another economic activity that assists in the generation of income or whether agriculture could play a dual role in generating income and also meeting basic food needs directly?

Diversity is a key principle underlying the construction of sustainable agricultural and food systems. This refers in particular to diversity of production types nationally and regionally (small and large, capital and labour intensive, with a range of products between and within farms).

A third issue that should be noted is that food security is a critical issue in both rural and urban areas. Many people may think of rural areas when they think of the need to support direct food production as a mechanism to relieve food insecurity. On the other hand national food policy tends to be distorted towards urban areas where production is deprioritised in favour of accessing the cheapest food available, even if this is produced halfway across the globe on the basis of government subsidies, or by offering farmers a very low price for their produce. Generally food prices are presented as a tension between urban consumers who want the lowest prices and rural producers who want the highest possible prices. Balanced growth is necessary where food prices reflect the true costs of production, including a fair wage, the internalisation of currently externalised environmental costs (soil and water pollution, wastage of water, the hidden costs of global and even national transportation etc.) and the value of food in human society.

In the context of high structural unemployment in much of Africa food production for household consumption takes on added significance because the possibilities of secure, reasonably-paid employment are slim for a large percentage of the population.

Utilisation of food serves as the interconnection between food production and distribution and other sectors, in particular health. Utilisation refers to food quality and nutritional content, and the biological capacity of an individual to absorb the available nutrients most effectively. This relates to health, HIV/AIDS, access to water and clean energy sources, and other related issues.

The social context that enhances or reduces food security is an important element for consideration and is dealt with more in the section on integrating food security and sustainable livelihoods below.

The definition of food security and the food security approach tends to focus on a goal rather than a programme with specific policies and actions. An advance on this is the Food Sovereignty approach with specific policies and actions embedded in the definition. The international movement of peasants and small farmers, Via Campesina, has developed seven principles of food sovereignty as a guide to action (Windfuhr and Jonsen 2005, 17). These are:

• Food as a basic human right (building on existing international law to this effect);
• Agrarian reform, especially the redistribution of land to the landless;
• Protecting natural resources (sustainable production systems and conservation of biodiversity);
• Reorganising food trade (food first and foremost a source of nutrition and only secondarily an item of trade, prioritisation of production for domestic use and food self-sufficiency);
• Ending the globalisation of hunger (regulation and taxation of speculative capital and enforceable codes of conduct for food and agricultural multinationals);
• Social peace (freedom from violence for all);
• Democratic control over agricultural policy and other decision making at all levels.