ix
Understanding Linkages among Food Avail-
ability, Access, Consumption, and Nutrition in
Africa starts with the unsurprising observations
that: (1) having enough food available at na-
tional and local levels is necessary but not suf-
ficient for ensuring that households have ad-
equate access to food; (2) having adequate
household access to food is necessary but not
sufficient for ensuring that all household mem-
bers consume an adequate diet; and (3) con-
suming an adequate diet is necessary but not
sufficient for maintaining a healthy nutritional
status.
*
Recognizing that the links from food
availability to access to consumption to nutri-
tional status are not automatic, the challenge
for policy makers and analysts concerned with
achieving food and nutrition security is to un-
derstand how these variables are linked to one
another, how closely they are related in various
contexts, and what the important intervening
variables are which affect the linkages among
these variables. Unfortunately, however, cur-
rent ability to understand the nature and extent
of the relationships among these variables in
detail has been hampered by a lack of informa-
tion as well as by concerns over the appropri-
ateness of the analytical approaches and indica-
tors that have have been used in empirical studies
of these issues.
While these observations are not new to
most experts in food security policy analysis,
they are nevertheless frequently overlooked by
policy makers involved in planning and imple-
menting food security strategies. Understand-
ing Linkages among Food Availability, Access,
Executive Summary
Consumption, and Nutrition in Africa tries to
assist such policy makers in understanding and
recognizing the importance of these issues by:
(1) bringing together many (though certainly
not all) empirical findings from the literature
regarding linkages along the food availability-
nutrition pathway; (2) discussing issues about
the appropriateness of the indicators, data, and
analytical approaches used for generating these
empirical findings; and (3) identifying implica-
tions of these findings and methodological con-
cerns for improving food security strategies and
analysis.
One important theme running through this
paper is that gains in food access, consumption,
and nutritional status may depend more on how
gains in food availability, access, and consump-
tion, respectively, are achieved than on whether
they are achieved. For instance, increased food
availability may not lead to increased food ac-
cess, if the former is achieved in such a way
that has negative effects on the real incomes of
low-income households. Also, increased house-
hold access to food may not lead to increased
food consumption for family members if the
former is achieved in a way that results in ad-
verse shifts in income or time allocation for
household members more concerned with fam-
ily food provision. And increased food con-
sumption may not lead to improved nutritional
status if the means by which consumption gains
are realized have negative health effects that
impair the body's ability to absorb and utilize
ingested nutrients.
A second important theme of this paper is
that more attention is needed on methodologi-
cal issues associated with trying to empirically
test linkages among availability, access, con-
sumption, and nutrition. Particularly important
*
The terms food availability, food access, food con-
sumption, and nutritional status are defined in Sec-
tion 1.3.