SPECIAL PROGRAMME FOR FOOD SECURITY

Food security is defined as access by all people at all times to the food needed for a healthy and active life. To achieve this goal, three conditions have to be met, namely: (i) ensuring adequacy of food supply or availability; (ii) ensuring stability of supply; and (iii) ensuring access to food. Despite sustained efforts by governments and the international community, today there are some 800 million people in developing and transition countries, about 17 percent of their total populations who are chronically undernourished, lacking sufficient food to live healthy and active lives. Millions more live in conditions that expose them to risk. Although impressive advances have been made in agriculture, food production in many countries has failed to keep pace with the demand from a rapidly growing and increasingly urban population.

Most of the world's hungry live in low-income, food-deficit countries (LIFDCs). Over 80 in number, LIFDCs are located mainly in the developing world, and half of them are in Africa. The countries do not produce enough food to meet their needs and do not generate sufficient foreign exchange to pay for food imports. Many of those countries are heavily in debt and chronically depend on food aid. Among the basic causes of the high incidence of chronic undernutrition and food insecurity are: (i) low productivity in agriculture, associated with policy, institutional and technological constraints; (ii) high seasonal and year-to-year variability, which is often linked to insufficient water or inadequate water control for crop and livestock production; (iii) scarcity of off-farm employment opportunities; and (iv) inadequate and uncertain incomes in both rural and urban areas. These causes are closely interrelated; they are also root causes of poverty which is a major cause of food insecurity.

The Special Programme for Food Security (SPFS), launched after its unanimous approval by the FAO Council in 1994 and endorsed by the World Food Summit in 1996, aims at assisting LIFDCs to increase food production and productivity on a sustainable basis, reduce year-to-year variability of production and improve access to food. The design of the Programme is based on the recognition that the capacity of farmers to contribute to greater national food security in many developing countries on a sustainable basis is confronted by four major constraints:

(i) Shortage of available moisture: except in the more humid and temperate areas of the world, soil moisture availability is the major factor affecting crops and livestock performance, limiting yield, contributing to inter-seasonal variability in outputs and creating a deterrent to the adoption of technologies which offer the prospect of raising productivity.

(ii) Lack of access to improved technologies: once moisture constraints are overcome, varietal response capacity, soil fertility limitations, incidence of pests and diseases (both during production and storage) and lack of knowledge and skills emerge as major limiting factors.

(iii) Excessive dependence on a narrow range of products: the lack of diversification within many production systems exposes farmers unduly to climatic vagaries, pests and diseases and price fluctuations, leads to fluctuations in income levels during the year.

(iv) Lack of incentives for raising output and improving sustainability: a negative policy and socio-economic environment, weaknesses in agricultural services, insecurity of land tenure, price instability and an absence or breakdown in rural infrastructure combine to actively discourage farmers from expanding output.

The Special Programme, and in particular Phase I, sets out to address these four major areas of constraint, on a small-scale and with a narrow range of interventions, but with the ultimate goal of having an impact on national policy and the socio-economic environment.

Implementation of the SPFS takes place in two stages, referred to as Phase I and Phase II. Phase I is expressly designed to be "progressive" within its limits of institutional capacities and resources. Its four interrelated and complementary components are water control, intensification of crop production systems, diversification of production systems, and constraints analysis and resolution.

Phase 1 usually begins only on a few sites. As more resources become available and confidence builds in the approach, Phase I may be extended in two ways: (i) by increasing the number of sites, gradually covering all the different agro-ecological and administrative areas of the country, also including urban and peri-urban sites; and (ii) by extending the range of activities at the same location to include more components, where the Programme started with partial implementation.

The scope of Phase II activities is basically dependant on the outcome of Phase I, but a further determining factor is the need for integration with both national and regional agricultural development and food security strategies. The aim is to build on the achievements of Phase I by creating suitable conditions for large-scale replication of successful development approaches and Phase II, the macro-economic phase of the SPFS, consists of assistance to governments to prepare a food security and agricultural policy programme, an agricultural investment programme, and the preparation of feasibility studies for bankable projects.

The SPFS is a multi-disciplinary and nationally-owned programme, with a strong emphasis on meeting people's needs directly by raising farmers' incomes, generating rural employment, increasing social equity and promoting gender sensitivity. Every country that indicates an interest in participating in the SPFS commits itself to establishing a National Programme, designed to achieve national food security, and to formulating a Plan of Action, stipulating two or three years of Phase I activities. A particular feature of the Programme is South-South Cooperation. Under this initiative, more advanced developing countries send field technicians and experts to specific recipient countries for two or three years, during which they work directly and live with the rural communities involved in the Programme. The number of experts required is determined on a case-by-case basis, but must be adequate to achieve a critical mass with the site coverage of the different agro-climatic regions of the country concerned.

See specific details on development of SPFS activities under:

For information on formulation of specific SPFS components with supportive normative frameworks and "best practice" project examples, as well as examples of common elements of project documents, see:

The below support documents are provided in the Toolkit to assist in SPFS programme preparation:


For complete information on SPFS project formulation, see the SPFS Handbook, including all guidelines and support reference materials, available on the:

For additional information covering SPFS activities, see: