Chapter 2


There is also the question of interpreting the nutritional statistics. How serious a situation is
it if, say, a survey determines that 5% of the nation's children suffer from third degree
malnutrition? There are two ways of interpreting the information, in relationship to figures
prevailing in other countries and in terms of the trend existing in one's own country. The
World Health Organisation suggested in the 1980s that 40-45% of children in developing
countries suffered from mild or 1st degree malnutrition, 25% from 2nd degree or moderate
malnutrition and 3% from severe or third degree malnutrition. However, these numbers are
heavily weighted by relatively high levels of malnutrition in the populous Asian countries.
Should a country like Costa Rica be concerned over the existence of 0.5% severe
malnutrition in 1975? In terms of other countries in Central America this is a low figure, and
it had fallen to this level from 1.5% a decade earlier. At this level, the issue is one of social
and political priorities, as well as the economic cost of tackling a problem of this magnitude.

The appropriate response will depend on the relative size and concentration of the nutrition
problem and whether it can be shown to be primarily a food security problem. If 40% of the
population appears to suffer from a nutrition problem which is primarily food related, then
the policy response has to be a broad one, probably affecting major macroeconomic
parameters such as price levels and the overall level of economic activity. A problem which
affects 5% of the population at a serious level may be approached from a tightly targeted
perspective. The extent and pattern of the problem, as shown by nutritional indicators, will
determine the nature of the policy response.

4. The Aggregate Household Food Security Index

In the last few years, the Committee on Food Security in FAO has been supporting efforts to
develop and index for food security that incorporates all three elements of FAO's concept of
food security, namely availability and stabilityof food supplies and access to food. The
Aggregate Household Food Security Index which has been developed combines an
indicator of per caput food availability for human consumption (Dietary energy supplies in
kilocalories) with information on the distribution of available food, and takes the following
form:
 AHFSI = 100-[H{G+(1-G)I1) + 0.5{ 1-H[G-(1-G)I']}]100
 where

 H is a head-count of the proportion of the total population undernourished;
 G is a measure of the extent of the food gap of the average undernourished shortfall in
 dietary energy supplies from national average requirements for dietary energy;
 IP is a measure of inequality in the distribution of the individual food gaps of the
 undernourished, based on the Gini coefficient;
 0 is the coefficient of variation in dietary energy supplies, which gives the probability of
 facing temporary food shortage.

 The value of this index ranges from 100, which represents complete, risk free, food security
 to 0 which would presumably represent total famine. Countries which have an AHFSI of less
 than 65 are deemed to have a critical level of food security, between 65 and 75 is categorised
 as low, between 75 and 85 is medium and over 85 is deemed to be a high food security level.