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This then can be combined with other information, on planned commercial and concessional
imports and estimates of national consumption requirements, to from a simple food balance
sheet, which can identify food gaps. More sophisticated and developed early warning
systems may also collect information on local market prices, to assess the extent of shortages
in various local and regional markets.

Although this is referred to food security monitoring, in practice in most countries, the
information collected is primarily on cereals. This reflects the existing bias in agricultural
statistical systems. This can lead to overestimates of problems in countries where people
move quite readily between cereal and root crop consumption.

Nutrition monitoring at a national level is not as common as the early warning system. but a
number of countries do have operational systems. However, these are frequently
disappointing in terms of the information that can be derived from them and the use to which
it can be put. All too often, information on nutritional status of children is collected in
isolation from the kind of socio-economic information which would allow relevant causal
analysis to be undertaken. This is particularly likely to be the case if data are collected from
the health system. This reinforces the tendency in many countries to regard nutrition
problems as primarily the responsibility of the health sector, and irrelevant to problems of
food security and poverty.

Nutritional information can often be collected as a by-product of national health
programmes, such as information on low birth-weight babies from maternity hospitals. and
information on child anthropometry collected as part of a growth monitoring programme.
This can be a relatively low cost way of collecting information at a national level, but again
may not be collected in conjunction with relevant social information.

However, it is often perceived as difficult to train enumerators to collect accurate
anthropometric information. Sometimes medical personnel are reluctant to train non-medical
interviewers in these skills. In the past few years, more has been done to try to incorporate
nutritional data into monitoring systems, and this should increase our understanding of how
effective child nutritional data are, both as indicators of chronic food insecurity and of
transitory food crises.

5.3 Local and household food security monitoring

Local and household food security monitoring systems concentrate on monitoring access to
food rather than national availability. The two approaches can be mutually supportive, as is
indicated by the example of Namibia, described in Box 3.6.

The emphasis on collecting information at local level and through household surveys allows
the monitoring of coping strategies, such as distress sales, particularly of productive assets,
consumption of famine foods and outmigration. The impact of these strategies on local
markets, for example on livestock prices, can also be monitored. These indicators are often
very location specific and have to be collected at a disaggregated level.


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