Community Participation in Developing and Assessing Household Food Security in the Highlands of Northern Thailand

"To understand what the local communities meant by food security with respect to their own context, we conducted group discussions and workshops where members of the community at each site, both man and women, participated in the discussion forum..."

Communities in the highland environments of Chiang Mai province, Thailand, are food insecure, depriving of land ownership, and less accessible to infrastructure and services. This study aimed to understand how the highland communities perceive and define their food security and to develop a community food security assessment tool. The research was carried out with upland-highland farming communities in Samoeng, Phrao, and Galyaniwattana in 2013. Participatory tools were used, including agro-ecosystem analysis, historical narratives, focus group discussions, household interviews, card technique/ranking, and scenario and situation analysis.

The key concepts of food security as perceived by the village communities varied by village, as shown in Table 2 in the paper. For example, the vilagers in Ban Maepaeng used terms like "have food, and eat well: food is available at all time, food sharing and borrowing, rights to get access to natural food, enough saving, and access to governmental services and support to improve food production", and those in Angkhai referenced "Good life and well-fed through hard work: access to food (hard working, enough labor, good health, ability to generate income to support household expenditure); consume nutritious food, not over eating)". The meaning of food security as given by the farmers could be grouped into 7 attributes, as shown in Table 3. The distribution of these attributes differed among villages, and was context-related. Only Ban Maepaeng indicated the need for government services to help achieve household and community food security, perhaps due in part to the fact that the community had lost their rice planting areas to pave way for the construction of a water reservoir, so access to new farming areas for rice production required intervention at a higher (than local) governmental level. Food accessibility in this village was related to income and saving, but it also included sharing and borrowing, a social aspect that is commonplace in this community.

Using the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) food security framework, there were 18 key indicators covering farmers' meaning and perception of food security. Table 4 shows how these food-security-related statements or indicators are grouped into 4 criteria of the FAO's food security framework, namely food availability, accessibility, stability, and quality. A few striking and unexpected indicators were observed. For instance, farmers linked their food availability to availability of clean and safe water. The average food security level by averaging the percentage values of indicators in each category of the 2 upland and 3 highland villages is illustrated in Figure 1. Based on new modified indicators, the community's self-assessment showed that each village had reached different levels of food security.

The authors conclude that food security is a complex issue that covers many dimensions. Farmers still need food education, particularly on food nutrition and its relation to health. "To enhance household and community food secuirty [sic], therefore one needs to understand how local communities understand and assess their food security, so that appropriate measures to cope with food security at the local level could be designed and implemented."