Issue 10
December 2008Emergency food security interventions
by Daniel Maxwell, Kate Sadler, Amanda Sim, Mercy Mutonyi, Rebecca Egan and Mackinnon Webster
Emergency food security interventions are evolving. In the past few years new ideas have emerged for protecting the access of disaster - and crisis -affected people to adequate and nutritious food. Some old approaches remain relevant, but are sometimes not well understood.
This Good Practice Review explores programming practices in emergency food security. It provides a concise overview of conceptual issues and analytical and planning approaches, together with state-of-the-art programming practices in interventions designed to protect the food security of disaster - or crisis - affected groups. Along with a brief description of the intervention, its application, management and monitoring, each chapter includes references to the best topicspecific overviews, tools and case studies currently available.
This review is intended primarily for humanitarian aid workers, managers and staff, as well as government officials and donor agency personnel, whose task it is to ensure that food security is protected in times of emergencies. It is intended to provide aid workers with a full range of programmatic options and the means to determine which are best suited to their circumstances. While much has been written on food security more broadly, this review situates the emergency programming element in the context of the wider debate on protecting people’s right to adequate food.
The main presentation is available here: http://www.odihpn.org/meetings/gpr10-presentation-0309.pdf.


Food insecurity has many causal factors ranging from poverty, poor harvesting and storage methods, poor governance, marginalisation by narrow-minded regimes, and extreme climatic events – among many others.
Realistic strategies must be applied to subsidise farm inputs, improve harvests methods and storage, make marketing of surplus food more efficient and effective, and, most importantly, to ensure food security at household level. It is critical that grain and food strategic reserves also remain free of political manipulation and speculation.
kasili mutambo Posted on: Wednesday, February 25, 2009