Food Security: Theorizing the Evolution and Involution of the Concept Available to Purchase

The concept of food security is dynamic and ever-changing. This article tries to highlight the concept of food security and its changing dimensions with respect to space and time. The article examines the shift of the concept from aggregate food availability, which is a function of domestic agricultural production, trade and food aid focusing on the supply side, to food accessibility which is a function of income or purchasing power focusing on the demand side. The analysis here also incorporates other dimensions of food security such as food stability, food utilization, food vulnerability, food sustainability, risk measurement, anthropometry, etc. Moreover, apart from providing a comprehensive picture of the evolution of the different dimensions of food security historically, the present article also tries to present the involution of the concept of food security in such a way the that it can be easily understood. Also reviewed here are the indicators and measurement processes that are currently being used by scholars of different organizations and institutions for the analysis of food security. The article concludes that the concept of food security is a dynamic and vital phenomenon and there is no benchmark or standard method to measure food security. Thus, researchers and policy makers should very judiciously choose the indicators while keeping in mind what dimension of food security they are going to deal with.