ABSTRACT
Food security, became bound up with the idea of increasing national production of basic foods to reduce reliance on, and vulnerability to price changes in, international markets. The supply-based approach to food security assumes that if the structural circumstances are appropriate and favorable, food production and/or trade will expand to meet human needs. The consumption-based approach emphasizes meeting basic human needs by responding to aggregations of households or subpopulations such as pregnant and nursing women. The idea that basic human needs should form the focal point for efforts to address poverty and hunger has both strong emotional appeal and great practical logic, yet even consumption-based approaches have significant limitations and weaknesses. El Salvador may be the extreme case, but its problems underscore the difficulty of finding ways to deal with food security within the context of existing production and consumption policies.
