Multidimensional food security index (MFSI)
Clearly, the access variables were the most important for our MFSI and are mostly related to socioeconomic conditions of the population. Monetary poverty is a historical and widespread problem for the Caatinga population and as well as in other parts of the world, it is among the most important drivers of food insecurity (Fan & Brzeska, 2016; Nahid et al., 2021). On the other hand, the role of socioeconomic inequality is not clear but wealth concentration can also mean generalised low access to food (Klassen & Murphy, 2020). The interplay of the other dimensions and their variation in the degree of importance between years precludes the search for general patterns and lead to the notion that a great number of factors can shift in importance to determine food security over time (FAO, 2022). One important lesson is the prevalence of access variables within the dimension of the index we created. Stability of food production also had some influence and highlighted the importance of collective association of farmers and the long-term protection of water resources (Parraguez-Vergaraet al., 2018). Surprisingly, neither utilisation nor availability variables contributed significantly to our index, reinforcing the rationale that food security is less influenced by food production or capacity to process food (Barrett, 2010). Yet, our results concur that access is far more important than the other dimensions to determine a population’s food security (Barrett, 2010; FAO, 2020) even in high-income countries, such as the U.S. (O’Hara & Toussaint, 2021).