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IFPRI ForumReducing food insecurity in the developing world continues to be a major public policy challenge and one that is complicated by lack of information on the location, severity, and causes of food insecurity. Such information is needed to properly target assistance, evaluate whether progress is achieved, and develop appropriate interventions to help those in need. A recent IFPRI research report on food insecurity by Lisa C. Smith, Harold Alderman, and Dede Aduayom (www.ifpri.org/pubs/abstract/rr146.asp) contains new estimates of food insecurity based on food data collected from 12 Sub-Saharan African countries as part of household expenditure surveys (HESs).
HESs offer a rich lens through which to examine food insecurity among and within countries. The surveys used for this report examine a wide variety of socioeconomic characteristics—including region of residence, urban or rural residence, economic status, and female- or male-headed household—that can be of particular interest to policymakers. One consistent pattern that emerged is that urbanites and male-headed households in eastern and southern Africa have a clear advantage when it comes to diet quality.
The report demonstrates the value of HES data for generating estimates of both diet quantity indicators and diet quality indicators. Further, it shows that estimates of food-energy deficiency based on HESs differ substantially for many countries from estimates based on aggregate country food availability rather than directly on data representing peoples' access to food.
The approach used in this report demonstrates that household expenditure surveys are a rich source of data for improving food security measurement. They can improve understanding of benchmarking and measure progress toward the United Nations' Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people suffering from hunger by 2015, and the World Food Summit Goal of cutting the absolute number of undernourished people in half by that time. Though updating the HESs annually is not feasible due to their time-consuming nature, updating them on a five-year basis, at minimum, would help enrich understanding of progress in food security.