Defining Hunger and Malnutrition continued...

For additional information and analysis, see:

• The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012 (especially pages 12 to 14)- where the definition and most recent methods for defining and measuring food insecurity are discussed
• Fao.org - Keynote paper: Measuring hunger and malnutrition - for a detailed and more engaged discussion of the issues involved
• 2012 World Hunger and Poverty Facts and Statistics - provides a simple and accessible introduction to the issues of definition
• 12 Myths About Hunger - tackles many of the myths that are popularly discussed; accessible and informative

Note:

The 2012 edition of The State of Food Insecurity in the World published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation presents new estimates of the number and proportion of hungry people in the world going back to 1990 – 1992. This is part of an ongoing process to make more accurate and useable information available worldwide. The new figures reflect a number of improvements in the availability of data as well as in its collection and in the methodology used to create the ‘prevalence of undernourishment’ indicator (which is defined as the proportion of the population in a country with a level of Dietary Energy Consumption lower than the Dietary Energy Requirements. ‘Nourishment’ has both a quantitative and a qualitative dimension.

The new estimates in the 2012 report now include:

• the latest revisions and updates on world population data
• new data arising from demographic, health and household surveys that provide more
• detailed information and which revise the minimum dietary energy requirements, by country
• new estimates of dietary energy supply, by country
• estimates of food losses at retail distribution level by country
• a number of technical improvements in the methodology itself

Despite such improvements in the data and in the way it is calculated, a number of significant problems continue, including:

• First, the prevalence of undernourishment indicator (POU) is defined solely in terms of dietary energy availability and its distribution in the population and does not consider other aspects of nutrition
• Second, it uses the energy requirements for minimum activity levels as a benchmark for dietary energy adequacy, whereas many poor and hungry people are likely to have livelihoods involving arduous manual labour and thus higher activity levels
• The current methodology does not capture the impact of short-term price and other economic shocks, unless these are reflected in changes in long-term food consumption patterns.

For these reasons, the POU should be considered to be a conservative estimate of undernourishment.

Important gaps in the data remain and some of the key improvements need to include:

• An improvement in the quality of basic data on food production, utilisation, storage and trade; many Developing Countries need considerable support in improving data collection so that it is increasingly reliable and useable
• Improved efforts to maintain an up-to-date set of parameters for estimating undernourishment with regular checking of food realities in a given country
• Greatly improved ability to directly include information on the impacts of price and income shocks across populations and sectors country by country.