Regional Disparity of Vulnerability to Food Insecurity in China

Paraphrasing the 1996 World Food Summit definition, “food insecurity” exists when “not” all people, “not” at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food. In this perspective, our study examines the relation between spatial inequality and vulnerability to food insecurity from a socioeconomic perspective. A longitudinal analysis is applied to estimate the regional food vulnerability at provincial and sub-provincial level and the rural and urban contributions to the integral regional vulnerability are underlined. Theil Index and Herfindahl Index are used to quantify the basic factors for the evaluation of economic vulnerability to food consumption and diversity of food structure, which we also based on to proceed further studies and benchmark 31 Chinese provinces and municipalities by their vulnerability to food insecurity. Our main aim is to fill up the gap of analysing regional food vulnerability in a socioeconomic point of view in China, and hence to better depict the regional disparity in food vulnerability and try to provide useful information on the reality of food insecurity.