Regardless of whether our concern for malnutrition is embedded in the context of economic shocks or not, any discussion of social safety nets to protect and bolster food and nutritional security in the short run or nutritionally sensitive agricultural programs to improve nutritional status through improved quantity and quality of diets in the medium run necessarily raises questions about indicators of food and nutrition security. What kind of targeting devices should be used to identify children or households that are most likely to be in need of assistance? Should a geographical targeting method be used? Should a geography-based targeting be further fine-tuned using some sort of a poverty-based targeting mechanism? How should the nutritional impact of agricultural projects containing nutritional components be measured? Should one collect anthropometric data for every child in the project area before and after the project? Since food is only one of several inputs into child nutrition, how should any difference in the observed nutritional status be interpreted?

It is encouraging that in recent years, researchers as well as practitioners have developed a wide range of indicators to measure various aspects of food security. Yet, given how nebulous the concept itself is, the inability of any one indicator in particular to holistically capture all or most aspects of food security is only natural.<sup>3</sup> The choice of which indicator to use is often guided by the context and purpose of the analysis as well as tradeoffs between comprehensiveness on the one hand, and the ease and cost of data collection on the other. For example, the FAO uses national level food balance sheets to come up with global undernourishment or hunger figures (hunger being the extreme manifestation of food insecurity). The World Bank, in much of its own work on poverty, regards those below the food poverty line as food insecure _._ Likewise, policy makers may need to address issues of transitory food security caused by drought or political upheaval, in which case their main concern may be adequate calorie availability. Alternatively, they may want to address chronic hunger and malnutrition, which may require more detailed data collection at the household or individual level. Some indicators of food security may work well for populations that are relatively food secure, but less well for those living in chronic poverty (Haddad, 1992). Similarly, there may be variations based on culture, climate, agriculture, and food traditions and preferences to which any particular food security measure will have to be sensitive (Ruel, 2002). Because different indicators provide contrasting and sometimes contradictory accounts of the state of food security, the decision about which indicators to use may impact policy decisions about food security interventions (Barrett, 2010).

While there is indisputable merit to the idea that the purpose for which food security is being measured should guide the choice of the indicator, food security – irrespective of how it is measured – is often not an end in itself: it is a pathway toward securing good nutritional outcomes. If one is to take this perspective – and one has to, particularly while considering the highly policy relevant issues of nutritional 3