Guest post by Diana L. Caley, New York University, Ph.D. candidate in Food Studies, U.S. Norman Borlaug Global Food Security Fellow, Chicago Council for Global Affairs Next Generation Delegate
Manifestations of extreme hunger can be easy to identify, even to the untrained eye: distended bellies and stick-thin limbs are telltale signs of severe malnutrition among children. Images of famine victims, such as photojournalist Kevin Carter’s prize-winning photograph of a toddler being stalked by a vulture in Sudan in 1993, capture the devastating consequences of starvation. Extreme hunger is one of the worst forms of human suffering, so humanitarian agencies rightly aim to target the most severely food insecure individuals during crises.
Identifying and differentiating between less severe forms of food insecurity can pose more of a challenge. Consider two women I met last month in an impoverished area of Kampala, Uganda’s most populous city. Abigail*, a mother of three, explained that she constantly worried about not being able to provide enough nutritious food for her children. She had participated in a prenatal nutrition education program the previous year, so she felt guilty that she was rarely able to feed her children a balanced diet. Most days, her family filled up on posho made from cheap maize flour since their preferred foods like matooke (cooking bananas) were too expensive. Later that afternoon I met Juliet*, a single mother of two, who was peeling half a dozen white potatoes over a pot of water. The unsalted, boiled tubers constituted her family’s only meal of the day. She explained that after her home and adjoining shop were demolished several months prior, she had been relying on friends for food donations and working odd jobs to earn enough for at least one meal per day. Both women would be considered food insecure, but Juliet and her family were clearly worse off with respect to their food situation.
Hundreds of millions of people across the globe experience some form of food insecurity. It is important to for practitioners and policymakers to be able to differentiate between varying degrees of food insecurity in order to carry out effective targeting and evaluation. Administrators of food assistance programs, for example, need to ensure that aid is disbursed only to families whose need is the greatest. Policymakers must monitor how the food situation in a particular region changes over time. In both instances, it is necessary to know not just the percentage of those who are food insecure, but also the severity.
Over the last four decades, researchers have made important contributions to our understanding of food security. Food availability, access, utilization, and stability are now widely recognized as the fundamental “pillars” of food security, and cultural acceptability and food safety are increasingly considered important additional components. Progress on the conceptual development of food security has not necessarily been accompanied by improvements in approaches to measurement, so “concept-to-measurement gaps” persist today. While identifying hunger does not necessarily require elaborate criteria—like poverty, you often know it when you see it—the accurate and consistent measurement of a multi-dimensional concept like food security can be difficult.
Prompted by the need to better identify and differentiate between levels of food insecurity severity, a recent trend in food security measurement has involved the de-emphasis of derived measures in favor of fundamental measures. Derived measures such as income, assets, or food consumption patterns are assumed to be close determinants or consequences of food insecurity, so they serve as “proxies” of the concept of interest, hunger. By contrast, fundamental measures directly capture how households experience a given dimension of food insecurity.
Following this trend—and in a laudable effort to standardize the measurement of food insecurity worldwide—the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Voices of the Hungry project has developed a new metric called the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES). The eight-item module aims to capture the “access” dimension of food security by documenting respondents’ first-hand experiences of accessing adequate food. The survey questions reflect a continuum of food insecurity severity: worrying about how to procure food progresses into eating poorer quality food, which then progresses into reducing food quantity, and finally experiencing hunger due to a lack of food all together. (See Table 1.)
Table 1. The Universal Food Insecurity Continuum Framework
|
Mild food insecurity
|
|
|
Severe food insecurity
|
|
Worrying about how to procure food |
Compromising on quality and variety |
Reducing quantities, skipping meals |
Experiencing hunger |
Source: Ballard et al (2013).
After being piloted and adapted for cross-cultural comparability in several countries, in 2014 the FAO inserted the FIES into the Gallup World Poll (GWP). (The GWP is a nationally representative survey that is conducted annually in over 150 countries.) The FIES data will enable researchers to compare nationally representative data on the access dimension of food security across dozens of countries over time. Currently, different countries use a handful of different indicators and sampling methods, so researchers who wish to analyze food security data across countries are often forced to work with the statistical equivalents of apples and oranges. The FIES data from Gallup will enable researchers and the international community to track and measure changes in the severity of food insecurity around the world. This will enable better regional and global monitoring and planning efforts to combat hunger, such as the Scaling Up Nutrition movement.
The FIES does not, however, constitute a new “gold standard” for food security measurement. Consider the SAT and the role that this metric plays in college admissions. While the SAT score is widely used as a reliable and consistent measure of a student’s so-called “academic readiness for college,” it represents only one dimension of a high school student’s intellectual capacity. Enlightened admissions counselors recognize that the SAT score is a reliable but not sufficient indicator of an applicant’s skills and capabilities. While the FIES may someday become the SAT score of food security measurement, it is important to consider that the FIES reflects only one dimension of hunger: food access. As such, it should be used as a complement to existing measures that reflect other dimensions of food security.
Measurement matters. Policymakers must be able to accurately measure food security prevalence and severity in order to monitor and evaluate the efficacy of policy interventions, and to justify public investments in these interventions. Politicians, by choosing one indicator over another, can manipulate estimates of food insecurity to influence public opinion. Administrators of assistance programs that use means testing for enrolment must be able to accurately evaluate the welfare of individual families relative to the population. Just as health experts try to avoid “false negatives” in medical testing, food security practitioners must accurately identify truly food insecure households as such.
The stakes for getting food security measurement right are already high, and rising. By 2050, the world’s cities will accommodate an additional 2.5 billion people. Most of this growth will take place in small and medium-sized cities in Asia and Africa. I have spent the last three years researching the nature and measurement of urban food insecurity in Kampala, Uganda, currently the world’s sixth most rapidly urbanizing city. Sixty percent of Kampala residents already live in slums, and this number is likely to increase in the coming decades given a steady flow of rural-to-urban migration and an exceptionally high birth rate. Kampala residents like Abigail and Juliet—like hundreds of millions of others around the globe—already suffer from varying levels of food insecurity. In order to create sustainable solutions to address hunger in the coming decades, policymakers and practitioners must carefully choose the appropriate tools to measure the scope and depth of hunger.
*Names have been changed to protect the privacy of these individuals.
