Food Security
All people, all times physical and economic access to sufficient, safe nutritious food dietary needs and preferences active and healthy life
Assessing Food Security
availability physical access economical access utilisation vulnerability shocks
Static and Dynamic Determinants: Availability
- Average dietary energy supply adequacy
- Average value of food production
- Share of dietary energy supply derived from cereals, roots, tubers
- Average protein supply
- Average supply of animal protein
Static and Dynamic Determinants: Physical Access
- Percentage of paved roads over total roads
- Road density
- Rail lines density
Static and Dynamic Determinants: Economic Access
domestic food price index
Static and Dynamic Determinants: Utilisation
- access to improved water sources
- access to improved sanitation facilities
Static and Dynamic Determinants: Vulnerability
- cereal import dependency ratio
- percentage of arable land equipped for irrigation
- value of food imports over total merchandise exports
Static and Dynamic Determinants: Shocks
- political stability and the absence of violence/terrorism
- domestic food price volatility
- per capita food production variability
- per capita food supply variability
Outcomes: Access
- prevalence of undernourishment
- share of food expenditure of the poor
- depth of the food deficit
- prevalence of food inadequacy
Outcomes: Utilisation
- % of children under 5 years of age affected by wasting
- % of children under 5 years of age who are stunted
- % of adults who are underweight
- prevalence of anemia among pregnant women
- prevalence of anemia among children under 5 years of age
- prevalence of vitamin A deficiency (forthcoming)
- prevalence of iodine deficiency (forthcoming)
Food Security Measurement Methods 2002
- FAO method - food balance sheets
- Household income and expenditure surveys
- Adequacy of dietary intake
- Child nutrition status
- People’s experience with food insecurity
The State of Food Insecurity in the World
Reports:
1996
2015
2017
Meeting the 2015 International Hunger Target
taking stock of uneven progress
Stunting
process of failure to reach linear growth potential as a result of suboptimal health and/or nutritional conditions. On a population basis, high levels of stunting are associated with poor socioeconomic conditions and increased risk of frequent and early exposure to adverse conditions such as illness and/or inappropriate feeding practices.
Wasting
recent and severe process of weight loss, which is often associated with acute starvation and/or severe disease.
- FAO method - food balance sheets
- for 15 years, FAO used these sheets to determine how many people are food insecure.
o A country produces food, a country also imports food,
o it also exports food, the amount of food available decreases,
o some of the food is fed to the animals,
o some foods are wasted,
o then we convert all that food into calories
o we have the calories but we have different energy requirements
o calculate the energy requirement of the population
o based on the number, based on the sex, age, we know how many calories we need in this country
o let’s say we need 100000 but we have only 50000 available. This means half of us will be not get the calories they need. If the calories don’t match, then there is FOOD INSECURITY.
o It’s a way of having an idea of the calories available and how much people need.
o It doesn’t take into account the nutritional values and the micronutrients
o It doesn’t tell us who has access to these calories and who don’t
o This is so far the number one indicator of food insecurity in the world
o SOFI – 2002 was the last report – Rome
o United Nations have different organizations in their structure and there are many of them that deal with food and food insecurities.
o For many years it was only FAO, then in 2015 the other agents joined FAO, like UNICEF, etc.
o IFAD – international fund for agricultural development
- Household Income Expenditure
o Used to assess POVERTY
o People who are poor have higher risk of being food insecure
o The limitation with this method is that not everybody who is considered not poor is food secure. This assumes that non poor people are nor food insecure but this is not true, they can also be food insecure.
o The flip side of the coin, it could be that someone who is considered poor can produce high nutritional value foods.
o Middle class in developing countries
o Perhaps you make enough money but the living standard you have doesn’t allow you to have the foods you require in a day.
- Adequacy of Dietary Intake
o 24-hour recall questionnaire: what did you eat in the last 24 hours.
o Ask and convert into calories, micronutrients etc.
o Based on the answers and calculations we determine whether the diet is deficient of nutrients
o The consensus is we take 3 dietary recalls in order to have a good idea about people’s dietary patterns and the quality of their diets
o The limitation is the memory; some people don’t remember what they eat in 24 hours or how they prepare things or how much they had. It is time consuming to ask.
o It is not enough to assess only 3 days, you need at least 10 days of summary
- Child Nutritional Status
anthropometric indicators height or length weight sex age
- People’s Experience with Food Insecurity
o Based on the questionnaires that ask poor people what does being hungry mean for them.
o they say they skip meals, reduce the serving size, children say they are hungry but they don’t have anything to give their kids.
o Eating the same kinds of foods everyday indicated food insecurity as well.
o The quality of the diet is affected as well
o UN adopted this method for the sustainable development goals
o The most important questionnaire is called the food insecurity experience scale (FIES)
The Tip of the Iceberg: People Going Hungry to Bed
The food summit – November 1996 released the definition of the food insecurity:
o The goal is to reduce the number of undernourished people by half using the starting point of 1990-1992.
o By 2015 we were able to reduce the number but we are far from our goals. 780–>490
• Millennium conference: they didn’t focus on the number but they focus on the percentage of the hungry people. The target was 11.6 but we reached to 12.9%
• How come we were able to reach the millennium conference target and not the food summit? Bc the population is growing, nothing stays stable.
• Africa is the continent that has the highest percentages of hunger in the world.
Impact of Alternative Definitions of the Minimum Dietary Energy Requirements
What is the safest estimation?
- The physical activity is important to calculate people’s energy requirements
- The problem is that UN is not able to calculate or estimate the energy requirement of the world. The countries don’t have that information to share with UN.
- What is the safest estimation? We know the size of the population, the age and the sex of the country. So we assume everybody is sedentary and calculate the minimum energy requirements based on the population, age, and sex. We are underestimating the requirements bc not everybody is sedentary. Ex. Farmers, factories, hardworking people. In majority poor people work the hardest and their energy requirements are high. If we do an assumption, the normal physical activity, the green line, then we have 1.5 billion hungry people. These limitations show us how how big the problem is.
Zinc Deficiency
1/3 of the worlds population
over 200 billion individuals
Hotz and Brown - 2004
risk factors include:
inadequate intake or poor absorption from the diet
WHO 2008
GIBSON 1994
WHO 1996
