La complexité du risque d'insécurité alimentaire en milieu sahélien

International audienceMany definitions of risk actually coexist in the literature of social sciences. In geography, for instance, there is no longer a unique conceptual framework so that since few years, different methodological approaches have been developed to measure the risk. In this article, we argue that the risk does not only depend on the geographic and the temporal scale the indicators have been collected but it also depends on the way their spatial dimensions and their territorial impact have been understood. Many geographical studies put the emphasis on environmental factors of risk and their influence on community-based societies. However, this conception of risk leads to a major misunderstanding in food risk analysis: external, apparent and macro-factors of risk, such as aridity, spatial marginality and poverty are commonly overvalued in public policy decisions. These are the reasons why we think it is important to be careful while consulting thematic maps whose quality of the indicators can be questionable. Even if the geographical dimensions of food insecurity are gradually gaining in importance in food alert systems, it nevertheless seems to us that many interventions (by food distribution or food shortage) are still missing a great part of spatial and social heterogeneity and time uncertainty of risk. Hopefully, most NGO involved in food security and vulnerability programs are laying on micro-level investigation. We argue that it is from now on essential to take in account both the permanent and ambivalent interactions between different local contexts of food production and consumption, human perceptions of the risks in particular through multipolar collective family decisions unit's decisions.Au-delà de la diversité même des définitions du risque, il est désormais admis que la mesure de l'insécurité alimentaire des ménages ruraux africains, à la fois producteurs et consommateurs, dans et hors du marché, est aléatoire et incertaine. Cette démarche comporte des choix conceptuels et méthodologiques décisifs : faut-il mieux sérier les composantes du risque ou les combiner ? Faut-il privilégier des indicateurs ponctuels de déficit, de difficultés d'accès ou de faible capacité ou s'efforcer de prendre en compte les dynamiques ? Quels biais chaque approche comporte-t-elle ? Quels en seront les destinataires ? Pour quel type d'intervention ? Les recherches de terrain montrent que le suivi de l'insécurité alimentaire, à la fois variable et récurrente, conjoncturelle et structurelle, gagne fortement à prendre en compte les temporalités décisionnelles des acteurs