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With recent food crises at both regional and global levels, and renewed commitments from major donor countries to address chronic hunger, food security is more prominent on the policy agenda today than it has been in the past. Food security hardly needs to be defined again, and this paper follows others in using the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) definition. 1 The renewed emphasis on addressing constraints to food security has intensified the search for accurate, rapid, and consistent indicators of food security. Barrett (2010) notes that approaches to measurement follow the four major “pillars” of food security—availability, access, utilization, and risk (sometimes alternatively labeled stability or vulnerability)—which in turn tend to follow different strands of analysis. Measures of food access are important for many reasons but, practically speaking, they are most urgently required for purposes of early warning, for assessment of current and prospective status of at-risk populations, and for monitoring and evaluating specific programs and policies. More recently, given innovations such as the Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) tool, they are important for establishing the comparability of food security status in dissimilar contexts—a task that is critical for targeting resources on any sort of rational or impartial basis.

Different measures of the access dimension of food insecurity are used interchangeably, without a good idea of which food-security dimensions are captured by which measures. The associated risk is that the number of food-insecure individuals is underestimated when single measures are applied that are incongruent with a …