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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 FAO definition of Food Security was redefined in The State of Food Insecurity 2001 as: “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”.

Ministry of Human Development

Ministry of Agriculture

Ministry of Agriculture

Annual

Number of food insecure people, expressed in thousands

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.

Food availability: The availability of sufficient quantities of food of appropriate quality, supplied through domestic production or imports (including food aid).

Food access: Access by individuals to adequate resources (entitlements) for acquiring appropriate foods for a nutritious diet. Entitlements are defined as the set of all commodity bundles over which a person can establish command given the legal, political, economic and social arrangements of the community in which they live (including traditional rights such as access to common resources).

Utilization: Utilization of food through adequate diet, clean water, sanitation and health care to reach a state of nutritional well-being where all physiological needs are met. This brings out the importance of non-food inputs in food security.

Stability: To be food secure, a population, household or individual must have access to adequate food at all times. They should not risk losing access to food as a consequence of sudden shocks (e.g. an economic or climatic crisis) or cyclical events (e.g. seasonal food insecurity). The concept of stability can therefore refer to both the availability and access dimensions of food security.

Disaggregation 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.

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))

The indicator aims at establishing resilient food systems for the general population where most needed; creating targeted programmes for enhancing direct access to food for the neediest;ensuring that food security objectives are incorporated into national poverty reduction strategies which consider impacts at the national, sub-national, household and individual levels and have a particular emphasis on reducing hunger and extreme poverty.

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All the metadata shown was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/. Additionally, data was retrieved from http://www.fao.org/3/a-bl354e.pdf.