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The purpose of this indicator is to provide an estimate of the proportion of the population facing moderate or severe difficulties in accessing food.

The indicator measures the percentage of individuals in the population who have experienced food insecurity at moderate or severe levels during the reference period. The severity of food insecurity, defined as a latent trait, is measured on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale global reference scale, a measurement standard established by FAO through the application of the Food Insecurity Experience Scale in more than 140 countries worldwide, starting in 2014.

Ministry of Human Development

Ministry of Human Development

Annual

Number of food insecure people, expressed in thousands

Food insecurity at moderate levels of severity is typically associated with the inability to regularly eat healthy and balanced diets. As such, high prevalence of food insecurity at moderate levels can be considered a predictor of various forms of diet-related health conditions in the population, associated with micronutrient deficiency and unbalanced diets. Severe levels of food insecurity, on the other hand, imply a high probability of reduced food intake and therefore can lead to more severe forms of undernutrition, including hunger.

The FAO definition of food insecurity is: “A situation that exists when people lack secure access to sufficient amounts of safe and nutritious food for normal growth and development and an active and healthy life.”

FIES is a measure of access to food at the level of individuals or households. It measures severity of food insecurity based on people's responses to questions about constraints on their ability to obtain adequate food.

is by location, household income, composition (including for example presence and number of small children, members with disabilities, elderly members, etc.), sex, age and education of the household head, etc.

In addition, proper disaggregation of the prevalence of food insecurity by sex is possible as the prevalence of food insecurity among male and among female members of the same population group can be measured independently.

Data at the individual or household level is collected by applying an experience-based food security scale questionnaire within a survey. The food security survey module collects answers to questions asking respondents to report the occurrence of several typical experiences and conditions associated with food insecurity. The data is analysed using the Rasch model (also known as one-parameter logistic model, 1PL), which postulates that the probability of observing an affirmative answer by respondent i to question j, is a logistic function of the distance, on an underlying scale of severity, between the position of the respondent, 𝑎𝑖, and that of the item, 𝑏𝑗. Hence, Prob{𝑋𝑖,𝑗 = Yes} = exp(𝑎𝑖 − 𝑏𝑗) /(1 + exp(𝑎𝑗 − 𝑏𝑗))

This indicator is used to demonstrate that the inability to access food results in a series of experiences and conditions that are fairly common across cultures and socio-economic contexts and that range from being concerned about the ability to obtain enough food, to the need to compromise on the quality or the diversity of food consumed, to being forced to reduce the intake of food by cutting portion sizes or skipping meals, up to the extreme condition of feeling hungry and not having means to access any food for a whole day.

Compared to other proposed non-official indicators of household food insecurity, the FIES based approach has the advantage that food insecurity prevalence rates are directly comparable across population groups and countries. Even if they use similar labels (such as “mild”, “moderate” and “severe” food insecurity) other approaches have yet to demonstrate the formal comparability of the thresholds used for classification, due to lack of the definition of a proper statistical model that links the values of the “indexes” or “scores” used for classification, to the severity of food insecurity. For this reason, care should be taken when comparing the results obtained with the FIES with those obtained with these other indicators, even if, unfortunately, similar labels are used to describe them.

All the metadata shown in this document was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.