One of four briefing papers on key issues in food security, produced by a team of food security and rural development specialists coordinated by ODI. They aimed to brief DFID on key recent debates and international best practice in advance of the Committee on World Food Security, held at FAO, Rome, May 2001. The content of this paper raises several key issues:The reliability of the undernourishment data and what can be done to strengthen the data in the short and medium term; The need to go beyond calories when describing the world food situation and the need to describe the nutritional composition and safety of food supplies; The need to describe and analyse hunger hot spots in a more detailed manner; The need for more in-depth analysis of the food situation data, with better integration of non-food data; and The need to describe what has to happen if the World Food Summit (WFS) goals are to be achieved.