Widespread hunger and malnutrition persist today despite considerable growth in per capita food availability. This has prompted an evolving conceptualization of food security and of mechanisms to attain and maintain food security. This chapter discusses both food security and food assistance...

The prevailing definition of food security, agreed upon at the 1996 World Food Summit, is "a situation that 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...

Resilience offers a useful lens for studying how human well-being and the systems on which it depends can absorb and recover from a range of shocks and stressors, including events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking beyond the direct effects of observable shocks and individual or household...

This paper surveys the existing empirical evidence on the unintended consequences of food aid. Micro-level evidence is presented on the impacts of food aid deliveries on household labour supply, production incentives, consumption patterns and natural resource use. At the meso-level, evidence on...

This paper reviews the role of food aid in response to humanitarian emergencies. It outlines a set of basic principles for effective food aid interventions, and analyses a number of case studies in humanitarian response. The paper distinguishes between rapid onset and slow onset emergencies and...

This paper outlines a coherent strategy for the use of food aid in addressing food insecurity. It surveys recent literature on poverty traps, the rights-based approach to food security and discusses where food aid fits into an integrated analysis of poverty and food security. The paper...