What Is Food Insecurity?

When households don’t have enough sustenance to maintain a healthy life, that’s considered food insecurity. It’s a form of malnourishment arising from poor nutrition.

Insecure access to food contributes to several social and economic issues. That’s in part because food is a social determinant of health, one of the main factors influencing a person’s living and working conditions. This form of insecurity has deep impacts on development and learning in children, and it slashes economic output for workers. In advanced economies, it often occurs in lower-income households.

How Food Insecurity Works

Food insecurity occurs when there isn’t stable access to adequate food. That lack of access can be short-term, such as somebody having to skip meals to make ends meet, or it can be sustained.

In the United States, this form of insecurity is often attributed to financial challenges, including loss of a job, costs from chronic illnesses, and unaffordable or unstable housing. It’s anything that forces households to choose between purchasing food or covering other expenses.

However, some argue that systemic racism also leads to food security. Food insecurity is linked to low wages, residential segregation, and housing instability.

Food Insecurity vs. Hunger

Food insecurity is not always precisely the same thing as hunger. While interrelated and often used interchangeably, distinctions are sometimes made between the two concepts.

Hunger refers to the consequences of food insecurity, including the discomfort, weakness, illness, and pain of insufficient food. This can be contrasted with the cause of hunger: not having food. It’s that reality that the term “food insecurity” often refers to.

Federal agencies define food insecurity in the United States as “a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food.”

Types of Food Insecurity

Food insecurity is a broad term meant to capture whether food is available to people. In the U.S., it is usually broken into four categories:

• High food security
• Marginal food security
• Low food security
• Very low food insecurity

Someone is considered food-insecure when they reach low food security, which occurs when they have lower quality, variety, or desirability of the food they consume.

Famine

Globally, if the access to food becomes unsteady enough, it can become classified as a famine. This occurs when more than 20% of households suffer extreme food shortages, more than 30% of people within an area are acutely malnourished, and there are deaths over two people per 10,000 daily.

Several countries have faced famines or been on the brink of famine recently, including Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Sudan, and Yemen.

How Common Is Food Insecurity?

Globally, access to adequate food has worsened in recent years. In 2022, about 1.3 billion people were estimated to be food-insecure. Many causes have contributed to the escalation of insecurity, including rising food prices, greater agricultural losses from natural disasters, and trade restrictions. All these factors have made access to food less certain.

In 2023, The World Bank noted that, in real terms, food price inflation exceeded overall inflation in 74% of the 167 countries it inspected. A 2023 report by the United Nations noted that disaster events destroyed an estimated $3.8 trillion in crops and livestock from 1991 to 2021. Meanwhile, 19 countries have imposed food export bans, with others imposing export limits following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  

Within the United States, unstable access to food is startlingly common. In 2022, 44.2 million people lived in food-insecure households in the U.S., with millions more living on the cusp of food insecurity, according to the latest available figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).  

According to the USDA, it is most common in households with incomes below the poverty line and single-mother households. Racially, according to their 2022 data, it is much more common among Black and Hispanic households than the national average.

Broader Economic Implications of Food Insecurity

The impacts of inadequate access to food are particularly devastating to children, for whom it stunts growth and hurts intellectual development. But what are the economic costs of food insecurity?

In addition to swelling the number of people suffering from chronic diseases—thereby straining the healthcare and social safety net systems in countries like the United States—food insecurity slashes workforce productivity by increasing the number of sick days that workers take and reducing their performance on the job. The cumulative effect can be costly, with one estimate suggesting it costs billions annually.

Food insecurity also impacts future workers by preventing children from learning or succeeding academically, leaving them less prepared to enter the workforce.

Some argue that social safety programs—including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), known as food stamps—positively impact the economy. The USDA also argues that the program functions as an “automatic stabilizer” for economic recessions as it grows during economic downturns and shrinks when the economy is in an upturn and there’s less need.

The Bottom Line

There is a breakdown in food security when there isn’t enough food to sustain a healthy lifestyle within a household. This insecurity stunts development and impacts the broader economy by lowering productivity and increasing sickness.

Some measures that address food insecurity include social safety net programs that provide households with monthly stipends to spend on food.