The Status of Food Security in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Countries Abid Kamal * Food security is a new concept which emerged in the contemporary discourse but the concern for food security has been in existence since long when the men preferred to hunt larger animals to ensure longer food supply or farmers gained the knowledge of storage of agricultural surplus which tided them over a lean harvest. The term was materialised as a concept at the time of the global food crisis of 1972 – 74 1 and beyond that at least to the universal declaration of human rights in January 1948 which recognized the right to food as a core element of an adequate standard of living (UN 1948). 2 Initially, the definition, drawn at the World Food Conference in 1974 at Rome, was primarily focused on assuring the food availability and price stability of basic foodstuffs at the national and international levels. 3 Since then, it has not only continuously evolved, modified and diversified at conceptual and definition line but at the same time, the complexity and multi-dimensional facet of the term have also grown 4 as scholars across the globe working in various disciplines jumped into a common pool of food security studies and used the term in many different ways. The most cited and acknowledged definition of food security was formulated in 1996 at the World Food Summit, indicating that ―food security, at the individual, household, national, regional and global levels is achieved when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.‖ 5 Worldwide, there is a web of organisations, NGOs, institutions, government‘s ministries and think tanks which rigorously worked to guide, monitor, and help every nation across the globe to formulate dynamic and impressive policies and strategies for achieving and improving food security at the individual, household and national levels. The implementation and monitoring of the policies and strategies to achieve or improve food security require a wide range of resources such as 1) abundant water and land resources to produce sufficient proportion of required food consumption at domestic level, 2) sufficient foreign exchange to absorb the bill of * Research Scholar, Centre for West Asian Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi