the world food summit defined food security as availability at all times of adequate world food supplies of basic foodstuffs to sustain a steady expansion of food consumption and to offset fluctuations in production and prices the discussions in the subsequent two decades introduced an economic element to access food and thus made a distinction between chronic food insecurity related to poverty and transient food security associated with natural disasters conflicts or economic downturn as such food insecurity is the state when people do not have adequate physical or economic access to food this crosscutting nature of food security poses a difficulty in trying to measure it