The state of global food insecurity measurement: A mix of methods, and a mix of messages

Robust food insecurity indicators are needed for monitoring development targets, emergency responses, and rationally allocating foreign aid. For decades, global food security monitoring relied on the FAO’s prevalence of undernourishment, but this indicator’s fundamental limitations led the FAO to develop the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) and adopt the unaffordability of the healthy diet. In parallel, The World Bank monitors monetary poverty, arguably a food insecurity indicator in its own right. In this study we assess whether this larger suite of indicators agrees on: (a) which countries are most food insecure; and (b) whether global food insecurity is really deteriorating. Unfortunately, this new mix of methods produces mixed messages. Longstanding criticisms of the prevalence of undernourishment still apply, while rising undernourishment in the past decade is driven by modelled increases in calorie inequality that are inconsistent with income inequality trends. The FIES fares no better: severe FIES food insecurity is higher in several Latin American and Caribbean countries than in extremely food-insecure African countries such as Niger. The World Bank’s poverty and healthy diet affordability monitoring efforts are significantly constrained by systematically fewer household surveys in poorer and more crisis-affected countries. How can this situation be improved? First, experience-based indicators need to be more rigorously evaluated for cross-cultural comparability, and alternatives need to be considered. Second, international agencies and national governments should pool resources to implement coordinated, high-frequency, multi-purpose surveys – focusing on poor and crisis-affected countries – to jointly monitor food insecurity, poverty and malnutrition, as well as their root causes.