For the FSC's 10-year anniversary in 2020, Jan Egeland (former Emergency Relief Coordinator in 2005) highlighted that the cluster system was established for clear reasons: to ensure predictability in terms of funding, leadership and response capacity in a humanitarian emergency and communicate with local people. The original idea was to ensure that accountable leadership mechanisms in-country could be contacted as quickly as possible to understand the needs of each sector and enable action (gFSC Global Partners Meeting, November 2020 – see video).

With the Humanitarian Reform Agenda in 2005, global clusters were established by the IASC (see 1.2.2. chapter 1). However, the newly established cluster system did not include sectors for which leadership and accountability were already clear as was the case for the agriculture sector (led by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO )) and the food sector (led by the World Food Programme (WFP)). In-country, this often resulted in different and/or separate coordination mechanisms for food aid, livelihoods, agriculture, nutrition, early recovery or different variations of these. 

In December 2010, based on the recommendations, from an evaluation of the cluster approach, to bring together food aid, agriculture and livelihood issues, the IASC revised the initial architecture to include a standalone Food Security Cluster (FSC), under the joint leadership of FAO and WFP. The FSC became operational in April 2011 as a global Cluster under the IASC architecture to coordinate the food security response during a humanitarian response, addressing issues of food availability, access, utilisation, and stability.