What do we really know? Metrics for food insecurity and undernutrition

Abstract

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Climate change, food security, and livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa

“…Indicators used to measure food availability include crop production and/or food production indices, livestock ownership indices, and national food balance sheets Barrett 2010;Renzaho and Mellor 2010). For instance, the FAO derives its ''undernourishment'' estimates from national food balance sheets (which refer to a country's food supply) and assumptions of intra-national food distribution (de Haen et al 2011). Productivity estimates are easy to procure at global, broad regional, and national levels, which may partly explain the persistence of the availability-based focus (Barrett 2010).…”

“…The field evolved from household and farming systems studies and draws upon the assets/processes/activities framework that was used in poverty reduction, sustainability, and livelihood strategies research (Scoones 1998;Ellis 1999;De Haan and Zoomers 2005). These approaches were driven by the need to deepen our understanding of poverty from a purely economic conceptualization (defined in terms of lack of income or GNP/capita), to the incorporation of basic needs (e.g., access to certain consumer goods and collective goods), to entitlements and the vulnerability of people to change (Carney et al 1999;De Haan and Zoomers 2005).…”

The Challenge of Measuring Hunger through Survey

“…This information is used to parameterise a distribution function from which the share of the population falling below calorie requirements is determined. The FAO method has been the subject of a heated debate with criticisms from, for example, Smith (1998), Svedberg (1999Svedberg ( , 2002 and de Haen et al (2011) and rebuttals by the FAO in Naiken (2007Naiken ( , 2014 and Cafiero (2014).…”

“…The FAO method has been widely critiqued by the research community (Svedberg, 1999, de Haen et al 2011, Fiedler et al 2012a) and defended by Naiken (2007. The debate mainly reflects concerns about the reliability of three components that go into the FAO's calculations: the mean, the spread and the requirement threshold.…”

“…The fourth approach, and the one that we focus on in this paper, is to use information on food quantities from HCES to calculate calorie consumption and derive hunger statistics (Svedberg 1999, de Haen et al 2011, Smith 1998, Smith et al 2006. The arguments are compelling.…”