Files
Abstract
In its Sixth World Food Survey released at the 1996 World Food Summit, the Food
and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported that 841 million
people in developing countries are chronically undernourished. This number and its
country- and regional-level disaggregations have proved tremendously useful to countless
aid agencies and researchers. In the context of a recent wave of new nationally-representative
household food consumption and expenditure data, this paper examines the
estimation methodology underlying this food insecurity indicator, which relies on national
aggregate measures of food availability and distribution. The paper finds that the measure
is methodologically biased toward national food availability and does not fully account for
the effects of poverty—the most widespread cause of food insecurity in developing
countries. The implications of this bias for use of the indicator in cross-country
comparisons of food insecurity and for tracking changes in it over time are drawn out.
The paper concludes by arguing that the time has come to review the potential for
employing the new household survey data for strengthening the empirical foundations of
the FAO's measure of chronic undernourishment.