Merisphere Documentary Fund
Acute food insecurity
Acute food insecurity describes a situation in which a person, household or population is temporarily unable to obtain enough food to meet essential needs without serious consequences for health, nutrition or livelihoods.
It should be distinguished from chronic food insecurity, which describes a persistent inability to obtain an adequate diet over a longer period.
The five IPC phases
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) uses five phases to describe the severity of acute food insecurity.
Phase 1 — Minimal: households are able to meet essential food and non-food needs without resorting to unusual or unsustainable strategies.
Phase 2 — Stressed: households are able to meet minimum food needs but have difficulty covering other essential expenditure without weakening their livelihoods.
Phase 3 — Crisis: households face significant food consumption gaps or have to take measures that damage their livelihoods in order to obtain food.
Phase 4 — Emergency: food consumption gaps are severe and acute malnutrition and excess mortality increase, or households resort to emergency strategies in order to survive.
Phase 5 — Catastrophe: households face an extreme lack of food and other basic needs, with individual starvation, death, destitution or extremely critical levels of acute malnutrition.
The classification describes degrees of severity. Being classified as acutely food insecure does not necessarily mean that a population is experiencing famine.
Catastrophe and famine
IPC Phase 5 may apply to a household even if famine has not been classified in the area where it lives.
For an area to be classified as Famine, three thresholds must be met or exceeded: at least 20 per cent of households face an extreme lack of food, at least 30 per cent of children suffer from acute malnutrition, and the crude death rate reaches at least two people per 10,000 per day.
Catastrophic conditions may therefore affect part of a population before the thresholds required for an area-wide famine classification are reached.
Several possible causes
Acute food insecurity may result from armed conflict, displacement, drought, flooding, crop failure, rising food prices, loss of income, market disruption or restrictions on humanitarian access.
Several of these factors frequently occur at the same time.
The presence of food in a country or region does not necessarily mean that every household can obtain it. Access depends on prices, income, transport, security and functioning markets as well as physical availability.
Measuring a crisis
Acute food insecurity figures should be read with their date, geographical coverage and classification method.
A projection is not the same as an observed outcome. A national estimate may also conceal very different situations between regions.
The number of people affected indicates the scale of a crisis, while the IPC phase describes its severity.