Chapter 3


Respondents in household surveys can also be asked about household food stocks and their
own perceptions of their food needs and food security.

Nutrition status information can also be collected, but this has to be done in conjunction with
information on health status, sanitation and maternal care, so as not to give a misleading
impression of food security problems. It is often too expensive to collect comprehensive
information on food consumption, though questions on the frequency of consumption of
major food items may be cheaper to collect. As with national monitoring systems, the
temptation must be resisted to develop comprehensive, but expensive questionnaires which
cover everything but are not cost-effective.



 Box 3.6 Food Security Monitoring in Namibia

 Shortly after Independence in 1990, FAO provided technical assistance to Namibian government in setting
 up an Early Warning and Food Information System (EWFIS) in the Ministry of Agriculture. This reported
 on agro-meteorological information, crop production estimates and grazing conditions. Information was
 released by means of a Monthly Crops Bulletin during the growing season, a Quarterly Food Security
 Bulletin and special Crop Updates and Food Security Updates as required.

 During the drought of 1992/93, the Namibian Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University
 of Namibia was funded to initiate the development of a household food security monitoring system to
 complement the national and regional information provided by EWFIS. This project identified a number
 of sentinel villages which were surveyed on a monthly basis, to provide information at a household level
 on food production, livestock sales and livestock deaths, income transfers, collection of drought foods,
 remaining food stocks and the extent to which households received food from the Drought Relief
 Programme. Participation in emergency Food for Work programmes was also monitored. This monitoring
 system provided valuable information on which regions of the country and types of household were most
 severely affected by drought. It also provided useful information on the effectiveness and scope of the
 Drought Relief Programme in the field.

 Unfortunately, funding for the programme ran out shortly after the end of the drought, so it was not
 possible to institutionalise household monitoring as part of EWFIS, as had originally been hoped.
 However, the project is being revived as part of the Namibian follow-up to the International Conference on
 Nutrition, and it is hoped to add anthropometric information to the data to be collected, to give a fuller
 picture of household food security.



 In some countries, certain vulnerable regions have decentralised, locally-based information
 systems, where the information is reported to the local community in the first instance. This
 can be very effective if there is some local autonomy and control over resources which
 allows for a quick response to emerging problems. Communities may well have local
 information which allows then to interpret the results of monitoring systems more accurately
 than statistical teams in the capital, and local planning committees are often more
 immediately responsive and responsible to the community. Turkana district in Kenya, which
 is extremely drought prone, has had such a system for a number of years. A pilot scheme is
 also being implemented in Kilifi district, where the problems are those of chronic food
 insecurity rather than those of transitory food shocks.


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