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Abstract
Household food security is an important measure of well-being. Although it may
not encapsulate all dimensions of poverty, the inability of households to obtain access to
enough food for an active, healthy life is surely an important component of their poverty.
Accordingly, devising an appropriate measure of food security outcomes is useful in
order to identify the food insecure, assess the severity of their food shortfall, characterize
the nature of their insecurity (for example, seasonal versus chronic), predict who is most
at risk of future hunger, monitor changes in circumstances, and assess the impact of
interventions. However, obtaining detailed data on food security status—such as 24-hour
recall data on caloric intakes—can be time consuming and expensive and require a high
level of technical skill both in data collection and analysis.
This paper examines whether an alternative indicator, dietary diversity, defined as
the number of unique foods consumed over a given period of time, provides information
on household food security. It draws on data from 10 countries (India, the Philippines,
Mozambique, Mexico, Bangladesh, Egypt, Mali, Malawi, Ghana, and Kenya) that
encompass both poor and middle-income countries, rural and urban sectors, data
collected in different seasons, and data on calories acquisition obtained using two
different methods. The paper uses linear regression techniques to investigate the
magnitude of the association between dietary diversity and food security. An appendix
compiles the results of using methods such as correlation coefficients, contingency tables,
and receiver operator curves. We find that a 1 percent increase in dietary diversity is associated with a 1 percent
increase in per capita consumption, a 0.7 percent increase in total per capita caloric
availability, a 0.5 percent increase in household per capita daily caloric availability from
staples, and a 1.4 percent increase in household per capita daily caloric availability from
nonstaples. These associations, which are found in both rural and urban areas and across
seasons, do not depend on the method used to assess these associations, nor when using
the number of unique food groups consumed is the measure of dietary diversity. There is
an association between dietary diversity and food access at the individual level, although
the magnitude of this association is considerably weaker than that between dietary
diversity and food access. Looking across all samples, the magnitude of the association
between dietary diversity and caloric availability at the household level increases with the
mean level of caloric availability. Accordingly, dietary diversity would appear to show
promise as a means of measuring food security and monitoring changes and impact,
particularly when resources available for such measurement are scarce.