The tortilla crisis highlighted that food insecurity is caused more often by high prices than
supply constraint. This problem coexist with the traditional concern with the occurrence of balance
of payments crises in importing countries and the price fluctuations in food exporting countries.
Concerns with food security predate the tortilla crisis. In the 2003 report on Trade Reforms
and Food Security, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) discusses its
evolution as an operational public policy concept and points out more than two hundred definitions
that appeared since the 1970’s. The official definition adopted in 2001 in The State of Food
nsecurity is: “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access