Measuring food access using the Cost of a Healthy Diet (CoHD): Insights from retail prices worldwide

Since 2020, measuring a population’s access to sufficient nutritious food for an active and healthy life has been done with a new metric known as the Cost and Affordability of Healthy Diets (CoAHD), computed annually for all countries by the World Bank and the FAO, and also used by researchers and national governments to track spatial and temporal variation within countries. This new kind of cost and affordability data measures food access using market prices of the least expensive locally available items that would meet nutritional criteria adopted by national governments, as summarized in a Healthy Diet Basket (HDB) level of intake balanced among six complementary food groups: starchy staples, vegetables, fruits, fats & oils, animal source foods, and legumes, nuts or seeds. CoAHD metrics reflect the definition of food security introduced during the World Food Summit of 1996, and complement earlier measures of global food security used by UN agencies and governments, which are the Prevalence of Undernourishment (PoU) based on total national availability and intake distribution of calories, and the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) based on survey data asking whether a household ran out of resources to acquire their usual diets. This paper briefly discusses the evolution of global food security measurement, then highlights updates to the methods used to compute CoAHD indicators and presents newly available CoAHD data obtained using this methodology and updated price data.