I am working on my master thesis dissertation for which I need a time series data on food security in Turkey (from 2000 until the the most recent available year) as a single variable. I searched the organizations working for food security, nutrition and hunger such as FAO, WFP, UNICEF and etc., they all have some data which is impracticable in my case for various reasons: it is on a household level, individual level, only focused on nutrition, only food production, only food import/export/prices, and etc.
In addition, I checked out some papers written on food security but was unable to find a way, I looked into World Bank Database I was unable to retrieve any data related to food security in Turkey as a single variable. I need a national level (not HH or individual), single variable, maybe an index or something. Please, help me out!
It may be useful for you to consult the database of the Statistics division of FAO, the FAOSTAT:
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data.
Among the various domains, there are the section Food Security and the sub-section "Suite of Food Security Indicators", in which you can extract and filter data by choosing Contries (including Turkey), Elements, Items and Years.
Not sure why you say that FAO data are 'at the household level' - they are not. The FAO metric of chronic undernourishment is widely used to represent food security, and it is calculated entirely based on food balance sheets and 'disappearance accounting'. Yes, it seeks to reflect how many households are hungry or food insecure (or the prevalence rate), but that % is the national level of food insecurity. In a nutshell, the food balance sheet method aggregates all food produced, traded, stored, transformed, fed to livestock, lost or wasted, etc. into kilocalories which can be distributed along a bell curve defined by purchasing power in the country, and known elasticities of demand for different foods. The share of population below the notional curve of access to minimum amounts of calories is what defines (for FAO) the food insecurity status of that country. The annual State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI) is the go-to report for this stuff.
Dear Teresa D'Amore and Patrick Webb thank you for answering! I have checked FAOSTAT but I did not find the data for Turkey. The variables are available but cells containing the values are empty, saying not reported. It maybe available for other countries but I need data only for Turkey's Food Insecurity in last almost 20 years. Which is not in there.
If you can find it and share it with me I will be grateful to you!
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