<mark>to people and countries are huge as described in the ARC’s publication</mark> _<mark>The Cost of Drought in Africa</mark>_<sup>_25_</sup> <mark>.</mark> Integrating Output of Catastrophe Crop Modeling into a Food Security Assessment Model The risk of crop production shortfall can in principle be estimated for all the major staple crops grown in a country as crop models for all major staple crops have been developed. In a similar manner, risk to livestock can be estimated using livestock‐mortality vulnerability in place of crop growth models in the Vulnerability Module and a drought index that is appropriate for rangeland. Drought indices used for rangeland monitoring are Rangeland WRSI (Senay et al. 2011) and NDVI (Mude et al. 2009). The estimated probabilistic distributions of crop shortfall and/or livestock losses at national or sub‐national levels serve as input to a food security vulnerability model in order to estimate food security needs of a country.

Food security is intrinsically a household livelihood issue and national or sub‐national level food security has to start with an assessment of food security at the household level. National or sub‐ national level food security is then obtained by summing across all households that are assessed to be food insecure. The assessment of food security is not an easy task as assessments of food availability, food accessibility (both economic and physical accessibility), food utilization (nutrition, safety, etc.) and stability (long‐term accessibility to safe and nutritious foods) are required at the household level for a complete assessment of food security. The output of catastrophe crop/livestock models only addresses the availability aspect of food security but the other three factors (accessibility, utilization and stability) have to be assessed separately. Various approaches have been taken to assess food security at the household level and for the most part these models are based on an analysis of data collected from field assessments on household income (farm and non‐farm sources), household assets (land size, livestock size, savings, etc.) household expenditure (food and other items), and household coping strategies (actions taken to mitigate the impacts of negative shocks) (Seaman et al. 2000). The approaches can be classified broadly into two types (i) Direct use of field data on information on household income, expenditure and coping strategies to identify food insecure households as a result of negative production and/or market (price and/or labor), and (ii) Quantitative models of food security at the household level that have a more analytical framework for accounting that are quantitative and for production shocks, market shocks, and economic and policy shocks.

The first approach is favored by practitioners in the field such as those involved in the WFP’s emergency food security assessments, EFSA, (WFP 2009) or the joint FAO and WFP crop and food security assessment missions, CFSAM<sup>26</sup> , and in EWS of food security such as the USAID’s FEWS NET and FAO’s GIEWS. The exact methodologies used in EFSA, FEWS NET and GIEWS to assess food security vary but essentially these rely on estimating the impact on household income and household expenditure resulting from production shortfalls and/or market price hikes to identify households with a food gap. EFSA and CFSAM for instance consider the impacts of (i) production shocks (as estimated from field surveys or crop models), (ii) hikes in food prices and other

> 25 _The Cost of Drought in Africa_ is available at

> <u>http://www.africanriskcapacity.org/documents/350251/371107/ARC_Cost_of_Drought_EN.pdf.</u>

> 26 ‐ The link for CFSAM jointly carried out by the FAO and WFP is http://www.wfp.org/food <u>security/assessments/crop‐food‐security‐assessment‐mission.</u>

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