hello, Food security can be measure with using household expenditure survey consisting diet quantity, diet quality and economic vulnerability.

You can also develop some innovative ideas to  measure food security likewise socioeconomic status, agriculture productivity and religious norms.. 

hey. one of the best and easiest ways is the "coping strategies index". check the publications by Daniel Maxwell (1995, and that time IFPRI, and later years). we used it in a survey in Dhaka, bangladesh.

PRA methods are very efficient, too, and specifically designed to measure food (in)security of households and communities through qualitative interviews/group discussions.

all the best, Benjamin

Chapter Urban Food Security and Health Status of the Poor in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Dear Rachana and Dear RG fellows,

is very difficult to measure food security in developing countries where a large share of consumption concerns own products. In a non-monetary economy, the self-consumption is high and the exchanges often do not pass in a real market where money is spending. In these countries people  trade in the form of barter: goods for goods or services for goods and viceversa.

This is the first and main problem.

In producing their own food, farmers and their families should safeguard the health and safety per se, but often occurring processes of bacterial contamination due to inadequate preservation processes. In fact, in these countries, the food waste takes place right in the upstream phase of the process. the agricultural production and the processing and not downstream in the supply chain (marketing).

Greetings

Dear Ting, Benjamin and all

Thank you for your quality suggestion. Ting, I totally agree with on your views. Its also complicated to measure food consumption pattern in less developed countries as there is unequal distribution of quality food among household members, like male members and children eat first and female will eat the left over in most of the cases.

The link shared by Benjamin is really useful.

Thanking you

Rachana

Dear Rachana,

As you will have discovered, there is always a trade-off between accuracy (nutrition availability, seasonality, biometrics such as BMI and stunting) and speed or cost of the data.

Since this is one of the most important key indicators of almost any humAdd your answeran development effort among the poor or disadvantaged, COSA has conducted tens of thousands of surveys testing this and other important indicators to find the simplest effective form of consistently getting to a valid (verifiable) answer under most conditions (except those of marginal survival or abject poverty, but you may not need such a measure under those conditions where conditions are obvious).  You can find the key elements in a 2 page section (p. 56-58) of this document: http://thecosa.org/news-and-insight/publication/the-cosa-measuring-sustainability-report/ 

Good luck, Daniele

I also think you can make use of household food expenditure index, where by just a simple assessment of the each household food expenditure that is captured either on a monthly basis or annually could be use. This approach is very simple as you will only require the farmers to show their household food expenditure as well as an estimate of the cost of food eaten that was harvested from the farm, then you sum up to get the total household food expenditure.The mean of each of these various household  food expenditure is obtained then you calculate the 2/3 of the mean any household with less than the 2/3rd of this mean is considered as food insecured while those with more than the this value are said to be food secured. this is as used by by Omonona, et al (2007) and Olaolu et al 2013.

Before choosing a method to measure food insecurity/security status (at individual or micro-collective, you should define your objective (nutritional, economic,...) and the dimension you want to focus on. I have adopted and tested a temporal food shortage approach in two rural african areas (Northern Cameroon and Burkina Faso), between 2001 and 2004, balacing beetwen economic capacity to afford food and social ability to manage food resources. In a second time, I tried to identify and compare social status, food stocks and food rights but however without achieving to formalise the analysis.

You can to consult the following papers:

1. Prioritisation of Critical Factors to Implement Good Agricultural Practices Among Small Producers

2. Development of  an instrument to evaluate prerequisites to HACCP system

see attachment

Nelson

Wrong question! There is no possible measure of food security. Insecurity may be caused by drought, floods, crop disease (local or widespread), locusts, civil war, economic collapse, shortage of foreign exchange, submarine warfare (as in the UK 1939-44), epidemics etc. etc.  Or, quite often, by nutters in the World Bank imposing systems dreamed up in Washington (See my book, The Economist's Tale for one example.) No measure can cover all these. Nobody knows which is going to hit next. Yes it would be enormously valuable to have the most likely ones identified, with some indication of the sort of impact and the type of intervention needed. Think first and foremost of the policy decisions that must be taken and what information would help. In any policy envirionment I have worked, the assumption was simply that nearly everyone was on the brink with low food security. It would not have changed policy to have a measure of it.

I agree with Ting that these studies on food security in developing countries are questionable, no proper information is captured on most of these variables suggested in questionnaires. Most of the researchers they end up speculating compromising accuracy in most cases. FAO has injected a lot of money in these studies however most of the results are generalizations' just to say there is food insecurity, to what extent'

As you have gathered, it is complex. To find a simple solution you have to identify a proxy indicator that you can use on the assumption that it correctly represents a measure of what is/are the main problems affecting food security, so it can vary from community to community. It would probably be an indicator of wealth, health or nutrition that you can easily obtain.

What papers from WFP did you look at? Did you see this? http://resources.vam.wfp.org/

Good luck

Its very complex depending  on the unit of analysis, check the FAO  and WFP reports and could get numerous proxy indicators to aid in the food security analysis. Issues of access, availability, productivity etc. should be considered as well

Externally determined measure (objective measure) like Below Poverty Line, is based criteria that are uniform across households and communities. The subjective perception of food security is not externally determined measure. The subjective perception of food security criteria varies across households and communities. Hiremath, et. al. (2000), view food security as a subjective concept, defined by an individual farmer's own perception as to whether s/he has been able to support the family's food and fodder requirements for a year from all resources s/he owns, controls and manages. It is subjective because food security is an individual's perception based on her/his holistic considerations of her/his family's opportunities and constraints. The opportunities and constraints under consideration are his land-holdings, land quality, family size, among others.

Food security perceptions vary from family to family at a given time and from time to time for a given family. Despite its subjective nature, food security threshold appears to be a powerful measure that determinesthe darmers' decision making behaviour.

Dear Rachana,

Food security is a concept which incorporates three main dimensions - availability, access and utilization.  First of all, the answer will depend on which component you’d want to measure.

 If it is food insecurity at the individual/household  level and you are interested in capturing access to food the standard quantitative indicators which are used in the literature are the calorie-based indicators - calorie intake (absolute) or undernourishment  status which denotes calorie shortfall with respect to a given cut-off.  Income-based indirect measures like income-poverty , expenditure are also used . As the direct indicator of food access we’ve the perception-based or experiential indicators which try to capture direct experience of hunger by asking a single question (like the question on 'getting a two square meals a day'  in India’s National Sample Survey) or a set of questions  like the US Household Food Security Survey Module or recently developed Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) by FAO. Finally, a quick and simple indicator is household dietary diversity indicator which may capture quality aspect of food security by roughly capturing micronutrient intake.

We also have the anthropometric indicators based on height and weight (stunting, wasting and underweight/obesity) capturing nutritional status. These are outcome indicators of food insecurity and primarily capture food utilization/absorption. However, these indicators are also indirect and moreover, poor nutritional status do not always reflect food insecurity  and could be the consequence of health and environmental  factors too.

Methods like constructing coping strategy index or Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) techniques are also there but would be time consuming.

No single indicator can capture all aspects of food insecurity therefore using multiple indicators to identify the food insecure is always the best method. However, the quickest and the  simplest of all of the above would be the  dietary diversity indicators.

Having said that, the best suggestion would be to go through the following readings to get familiar with the various metrics  and decide for yourself what suits your purpose and data availability.

Frankenberger, T. (1992). Indicators and Data Collection Methods for Assessing Household Food Security. In: Maxwell, S. and Frankenberger, T. (Eds.), Household Food Security: Concepts, Indicators, Measurements: A Technical Review. New York and Rome: UNICEF and IFAD.

Barrett, Christopher B. (2002). Food Security and Food Assistance Programs. In Gardner, B. L. & G. Rausser, C., (Eds.), Handbook of Agricultural Economics, volume 2, chapter 40, pages 2103-2190, Elsevier.

Mason, J. B. (2003). Keynote Paper: Synthesis of the Five Methods for Measuring Hunger and Malnutrition. Proceedings. Measurement and Assessment of Food Deprivation and Undernutrition, FAO, Rome: International Scientific Symposium.

Ballard, T.J., Kepple, A.W., & Cafiero, C. (2013). The food insecurity experience scale: development of a global standard for monitoring hunger worldwide. Rome: FAO. Retrieved from http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/ess/voh/FIES_Technical_Paper_v1.1.pdf. 

Heady, D., & Ecker, O. (2012).  Improving the Measurement of Food Security (Discussion Paper No. 01225). Poverty, Health and Nutrition Division. International Food Policy Research Institute.

Jones, A.D., Ngure, F.M., Pelto, G., & Young, S.L. (2013). What are we assessing when we measure food security? A compendium and review of current metrics. Advances in Nutrition, 4(5), 481–505.

Hi Rachana,

As Georg mentioned the choice of few good indicators is core in that setting you have and they should be agreed upon in that community (can be separate group discussion). Also I 'd suggest you using PRA methods for assessing food security. And also i have added a link...

a) have small groups (10-12 persons) to be able to discuss,

b) try getting the variablity of the group members by single covered votings,

c)  if possible separate men/women workshops, because very likely the measurements/assessments will differ.

regards

Frieder

http://project2.zalf.de/trans-sec/public/media/upload/product/pdf/a789e55b0f0b4c51bc90a5f9fa102af9.pdf

Thank you so much F. Graef for your inputs and suggestion, I will do it accordingly.

On the issue of measuring food security is important to distinguish between output indexes and input indexes. If the interest is to measure the state of food security then probably more convenient to use an output index similar the Global Hunger Index which is based on three basic indicators: undernourishment, child underweight, and

child mortality.  

For more details on this argument and another source of input indexes see: http://goo.gl/AUzvzr

Dear Rachana Devkota,

Nice to meet you!

for your Q: It depends. No single indicator for food security measurement. It is better to use joint indicators rather a single indicator. If  your survey is household income based survey,  the simple and effective ways of food security measurement indicators are 1) household food consumption expenditure score 2) household diary diversity score 3) household copying strategy index for developing country. Please use these jointly. Refer:

http://www.amazon.com/Impact-Small-scale-Irrigation-Scheme-Security/dp/3659755613

http://www.ebook.de/de/product/24821257/molla_deribie_negash_impact_of_akaki_small_scale_irrigation_scheme_on_ho_hold_food_security.html

https://www.lap-publishing.com/catalog/details//store/gb/book/978-3-659-75561-3/impact-of-akaki-small-scale-irrigation-scheme-on-ho-hold-food-security

measuring food security is relative, it depends on the perspective from which you want to view it, which could be from either availability, access or uitilization

Dear Rachana Devkota, I am doing the same topic and got this,try if it helps you. Good Luck.

Questions Used to Assess the Food Security of Households in the CPS Food Security Survey

1. “We worried whether our food would run out before we got money to buy more.” Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you in the last 12 months?

2. “The food that we bought just didn’t last and we didn’t have money to get more.” Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you in the last 12 months?

3. “We couldn’t afford to eat balanced meals.” Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you in the last 12 months?

4. In the last 12 months, did you or other adults in the household ever cut the size of your meals or skip meals because there wasn’t enough money for food? (Yes/No)

5. (If yes to Question 4) How often did this happen—almost every month, some months but not every month, or in only 1 or 2 months?

6. In the last 12 months, did you ever eat less than you felt you should because there wasn’t enough money for food? (Yes/No)

7. In the last 12 months, were you ever hungry, but didn’t eat, because you couldn’t afford enough food? (Yes/No)

8. In the last 12 months, did you lose weight because you didn’t have enough money for food? (Yes/No)

9. In the last 12 months did you or other adults in your household ever not eat for a whole day because there wasn’t enough money for food? (Yes/No)

10. (If yes to Question 9) How often did this happen—almost every month, some months but not every month, or in only 1 or 2 months?

Source: Nord, Andrews, and Carlson (2004)

I think the number of meals people take in a day.