Measuring food security and beyond

Food security is a complex and difficult concept to measure but necessary in understanding poverty.

Written by Dr Chandana Maitra

Economists have long been concerned with poverty, which is undoubtedly one of the greatest curses on humanity. However, relatively little attention has been paid to food insecurity – an equally destructive economic factor with a potential to cause depletion of human capital.

Research in the US and Canada offers strong evidence that food insecurity in early years of life can substantially incapacitate a child. The adverse effects on physical, mental, and cognitive development of children are significant unless interventions are offered at the right stage. Hence, food insecurity may incur huge social and economic costs. One of the underlying assumptions economists worked with was that addressing poverty would automatically tackle food insecurity. A broad goal of my research has been to highlight the importance of understanding food insecurity from an economic standpoint.

Where it began

I started with some simple but fundamental questions: Who are the food insecure? Why are they food insecure? What type of policies can address food insecurity at the micro level? The overwhelming importance of accurate identification of who the food insecure were was particularly crucial for a country like India where, despite rapid economic growth, food insecurity and malnutrition are massive economic and public health problems. A reliable and cost-effective metric to measure food insecurity is needed to ensure efficient targeting of the vulnerable. The other motivation was to look for indicators which would go beyond the conventional calorie-centric approach to formulating food security policies, particularly in India. ‘Calorie fundamentalism’, as labelled by some researchers, fails to recognize that the concept of food security comprises the risk of macronutrient as well as micronutrient deficiency. The latter is a more serious threat to cognitive development and physical wellbeing.

The literature on food security measurement was growing at that time, evolving to keep up with changes in the definition and concept of food security in its attempt to come up with reliable and valid indicators. Barring a few, the majority of countries including India and Australia, did not have any national level measure of food security. Existing indicators were ad hoc, and applied without rigorous external/internal validation, often moving in different directions.

Given the multidimensionality in the concept of food security, such chaos was not surprising. The current definition of food security comprises four key dimensions: availability, access, utilisation, and stability. This implies that no single indicator is suitable to measure food security - instead a suite of indicators is required. Another key element in the concept of food security is vulnerability. Even if a household or individual is food secure today, they may become food insecure tomorrow. Hence, the indicators must evolve in a way to capture the uncertainty and dynamism in food insecurity. It was also important to recognize the subtle differences in the closely related concepts of food security (an ex-ante status); and hunger, undernourishment, or malnutrition (ex-post outcomes). The other challenge was to capture the element of choice and social acceptability embedded in the definition of food security – the adequate access to healthy and preferred food obtained in socially acceptable ways.

Figure 1: Distribution of households by food security status in Kolkata slum households, 2010 (author’s calculations)

Metric to measure access to food

My research focused on measuring economic access to food. The simplest way to define food access is in terms of ‘purchasing power’. My search led me to a relatively new measurement approach – experience-based food security scale which is constructed using people’s lived experience of food insecurity. The underlying hypothesis is that hunger is a managed process to cope with inadequate supplies of food and resources to obtain food. Originally developed by a multidisciplinary team of researchers at Cornell University, the experiential scales were recently adapted to suit the requirements of developing countries in the form of Food Insecurity Experience Scale, the official Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicator (2.2.1) to track SDG 2 of ‘zero hunger’. The statistical model that provides the theoretical basis for the experiential scales is the single parameter Rasch model, with roots in Item Response Theory. It is commonly employed to construct IQ tests intended to measure ‘ability’. Once the scale is constructed, a household (or the individual) can be categorised as food secure, marginally food insecure, moderately food insecure or severely food insecure. I adapted the original US food security scale to develop a similar metric for India, modifying the scale items to suit local food habits and cultural context. In 2012, the Kolkata Household Food Security Scale was developed, using data collected from a primary survey of Kolkata slum households in 2010 (as seen in Figure 1). The scale was tested to be reliable and valid.

Experiential food insecurity vs poverty and undernourishment

The development of experiential scale measures reflects the changes in the literature on measurement of food security. Previously proxy/indirect measures were used, which relied on determinants of food insecurity such as income/poverty. Indirect measures also included consequences of food insecurity such as undernourishment (calorie poverty)/or malnutrition. This new development offers a direct measure of food insecurity which relies on people’s word of mouth experience of food insecurity. When combined with these proxy indicators, multi-item experiential scale measures can ensure the most robust identification of the food insecure households. A series of three papers examined the association of experiential food insecurity with poverty, undernourishment, and malnutrition.

We found evidence of direct association between these indicators. However, there was a lack of one-to-one correspondence – for example, considerable food insecurity exists in non-poor households. In the Kolkata sample, 8% of non-poor households were food insecure. Similarly, a large fraction of food secure households were calorie poor. My results resonated that food insecurity may not just be a poor man’s problem, a dichotomy which has perhaps been glaringly exposed by COVID-19! Previous research in the US had raised similar concerns. From policy perspectives, the results imply that anti-poverty policies targeting the poor households may miss the food insecure sitting in non-poor households.

Experiential food insecurity vs malnutrition

A more complex relationship exists between food insecurity and nutritional outcomes – undernutrition (stunting, underweight, wasting) as well as overnutrition (overweight, obesity). Malnutrition is a potential, but not necessary, consequence of food insecurity. Nutritional status is directly related to the ‘utilisation’ component of food security -how food is absorbed by the body. This is turn is influenced by an array of non-food factors such as care giver education level, sanitary environment, women’s bargaining power, and intra-household allocation of food.

My most recent paper investigated this relationship for children and adult women in Maharashtra, India. We found that food insecurity increased the risk of mothers and children being underweight, but no association was found with child stunting (indicator of chronic undernutrition) or wasting (indicator of acute undernutrition). From policy perspectives, evidence of direct association of food insecurity with maternal undernutrition (underweight status) signals potential intergenerational effect of food insecurity on human capital development, highlighting the need for nutrition-specific policies. Robust microeconomic evidence exists on the intergenerational consequences of maternal undernutrition on children’s learning outcomes. Interestingly, we did not find any association of food security with maternal overweight status. These results are consistent with the evidence from the wider literature.

The overwhelming importance of accurate identification of who the food insecure were was particularly crucial for a country like India where, despite rapid economic growth, food insecurity and malnutrition are massive economic and public health problems.

Obesity is still predominantly a problem of urban and rich in lower-middle/middle income countries such as India, however, in high income countries the relationship is likely to be inversed. In the Maharashtra urban sample, we found 3% of women from the poorest wealth quintile to be overweight as opposed to 20% in the wealthiest quintile. Similarly, 8% of women from severely food insecure households were overweight as opposed to 19% from food secure households. In 2018, our workshop on ‘triple burden of malnutrition’ (organised in collaboration with Indian researchers) collated evidence from diverse settings in India confirming a similar observation – for example, dual burden of malnutrition (overweight mother and stunted child) is more prevalent in urban and rich households.

What next

My current focus is on food insecurity in Australia. In addition to examining the nature and extent of household food insecurity, my research aims to measure food access of individuals residing in the households to explore intrahousehold distribution of food and investigate potential intergenerational consequences of food insecurity on human capital development.

Extensive work remains on how COVID-19 may impact food security worldwide across age, gender, settings, and socio-economic groups. It seems, with the pandemic, we are suddenly back to where we started in 1974 when the World Food Conference was born against the backdrop of a worldwide food supply shock. Since then, food security literature has undergone two major paradigm shifts: a shift from a pervasive focus on ‘food supply’ at the national level to ‘food access’ at the household/individual level; and a shift from a ‘food first’ to a ‘livelihood’ perspective when it was recognized that people may choose to go hungry to preserve their assets and future livelihoods.

Today, amidst the pandemic and lockdown, we stand at a juncture where supply side issues are back to centrestage, while the problem of food access has become more acute with widespread loss of livelihood across the globe. Concurrently, the issue of food utilisation has become more complex than ever given its direct link to sanitary living conditions. Vulnerability to food insecurity is at its peak. We wonder if it is time for a paradigm shift again. Should we rethink food security and add resilience as a fifth dimension?

Dr Chandana Maitra is an Academic Fellow at the School of Economics at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on measuring food insecurity and exploring the interlinkages between food security, poverty and other indicators of wellbeing such as health status. Chandana has also worked as external consultant to UNICEF/FAO collaborative project on the scope of applying experiential scales in measuring food security in India.