Linking Emergency Response to Need in “Food Emergencies”

When an emergency occurs, agencies must make quick decisions on how to help people facing severe food insecurity. This paper addresses the challenges of designing appropriate responses that are linked to identified needs of affected households and individuals. The primary goal of any response is to save lives now and protect the food security of households and individuals now and in the future. However, instrumental goals and the specific means of achieving them are varied, and must be responsive to the setting in which the emergency occurs. The paper conceives the costs and benefits of a response as the product of how efficiently a resource is delivered (resource transfer efficiency) and the effectiveness of the resource and its mode of delivery in achieving the objectives of the response (resource use efficiency). Those designing emergency response operations need to focus on the combination of these efficiencies, not just on one of them.