1 Understanding food insecurity in rural Rwanda: how women ...

later shifted to access to food at household and individual levels after 1980 (Maxwell and
Smith 1992). The 1980s shift of emphasis from 'food production' via 'food security' to
'household food security' brought the household into the picture as a target and unit of
analysis (Gillepsie and Mason 1991, 32). The shift took place due to the realisation that the
problem of hunger has more to do with inequalities in distribution and that increased food
production was only part of the solution. Since then, the concept of food security has shifted
from simply being a question of availability of food (at the national or even local level) to the
more complex issue of access at the household or individual level (Maxwell and Smith 1992).
Although food security refers to the availability of food and people’s ability to access it, food
security can be a confusing concept because it is a complex, multifaceted problem involving
different interlinked aspects (McDonald 2010; DEFRA 2006). The definition of food security
changed with time. For example, the 1974 World Food Summit definition focused largely on
food supply, defining food security as the “availability at all times of adequate world food
supplies of basic foodstuffs to sustain a steady expansion of food consumption and to offset
fluctuations in production and prices” (UN 1975, 6). In the early 1980, the definition of food
security used by FAO (1983) was expanded to include both the physical and economic access
as vital components of food security, a concern incorporated into later definitions as well,
such as the 1996 Rome Declaration on World Food Security (Rome Declaration 1996). In
2001, FAO further redefined this idea, adding “social access” (asking whether all household
members have equal access to food) into food security, establishing the definition used today:
“Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access
to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for
an active and healthy life” (FAO 2009). What all the definitions have in common is not only
the availability of food supplies, but also the ability of all people to gain access to sufficient
amounts of nutritious food for an active and healthy life (Sen 1982; Clay 2002; FAO 2003b;
Runge et al. 2003; Barrett and Maxwell 2005; Shaw2007; Barret 2010 cited in McDonald
2010).
4.5. The dimensions of food security
1. Availability of food: availability of sufficient food refers to the overall ability of the
agricultural system to meet food demand (Schmidhuber and Tubiello (2007) and it is achieved
if adequate food is ready to have at people’s disposal (Gross 2000, 5). Therefore, food
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