---
title: "Food Security"
slug: "food-security"
updated: 2025-09-18T11:32:44Z
published: 2025-09-18T11:32:44Z
canonical: "vamresources.manuals.wfp.org/food-security"
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://vamresources.manuals.wfp.org/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Food Security

### How does WFP Measure Food Security?

The **Consolidated Approach for Reporting Indicators of Food Security (CARI)** is a standardized methodology developed by WFP to classify households based on their level of food insecurity. It uses data from a single household survey to provide a transparent and robust analysis, ensuring comparability and reliability across assessments.

The CARI approach generates an overall food security classification by combining indicators into two domains: current status and coping capacity. These domains are then summarized into a **Food Security Index**, categorizing households as:

- Food secure
- Marginally food secure
- Moderately food insecure, or
- Severely food insecure.

#### Four Key Indicators in CARI:

**Food Consumption Score:** Measures dietary diversity, nutritional adequacy and frequency of food consumption, categorizing households into acceptable, borderline, or poor consumption groups.

**Reduced Coping Strategies Index:** Assesses the extent to which households adopt coping strategies to address food shortages, such as reducing meal sizes or skipping meals.

**Economic Vulnerability Indicators:**

- **Economic Capacity to Meet Essential Needs:** Evaluates whether households have sufficient income or resources to meet essential needs beyond just food.
- **Food Expenditure Share:** The proportion of total household expenditure spent on food. Higher shares indicate greater vulnerability.

**Livelihood Coping Strategies Index:** Evaluates the severity of livelihood-based coping mechanisms employed by households to address food shortages.

These indicators collectively identify the severity and drivers of food insecurity. Together with **key demographic indicators** such as location, sex of the head of household disability status etc., this enables targeted interventions.