Paris School of Economics - L'Agence Française de Développement

1.3. Measuring hunger
1.3.1. FAO hunger estimates
The first of the Millennium Development
Goals, the elimination of poverty and hunger,
has three targets. The first is to halve, between
1990 and 2015, the number of people living
under $1 a day. The second is about providing
full employment and decent work to all. The
third is to halve the number of people living in
hunger. But how we measure hunger is as difficult
and contentious as the measurement of
poverty. The numbers that are usually quoted
are provided by the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) of the United Nations,
and are published annually in their annual
report on The State of Food Insecurity in the
World, the most recent of which is for 2009.
However, a September 2010 press release gave
the headline number for 2010, that there are
925 million people undernourished which is
a decline from 1,023 million in 2009. These
numbers measure undernourishment, the
number of people whose food intake is less
than their needs, rather than malnutrition,
which measures anthropometric or medical
outcomes, including those that are the consequence
of undernourishment, for example by
being too thin or too short. The FAO calculates
undernourishment by calculating total
food supplies for each country, converting
them to calories, and distributing them over
people assuming a log normal distribution,
whose variance is estimated from household
survey data on calorie consumption. Current
estimates, including those for 2009 and 2010,
are based on projections of food supplies, since
there are no available surveys or food supply
data for those years; indeed, at the time of
writing, 2010 has some months to run. That
the FAO should be able to provide such upto-date
numbers has fueled critical discussion,
in particular on the Aid Watch Blog (Easterly,
2010), which also contains a response by David
Dawe of the FAO, and by Richard King of
Oxfam who provides an excellent summary
of the FAO methodology.
One persistent concern about the hunger
estimates, like the poverty estimates, is that
they are not subject to the checks and balances
that surround important national statistics,
such as unemployment rates or consumer
prices indexes, whose production is insulated
from the agencies responsible for policymaking,
e.g. the central bank or the finance
ministry. Publication of the hunger numbers is
often accompanied by calls for more aid,
although not usually by evidence that more
aid would be effective in reducing hunger. I do
not believe that the hunger (or poverty) estimates
are constructed in anything other than
a thoroughly professional way, but I do think
that these numbers would be more credible
were they subject to better international control,
for example by a panel of international
statisticians, demographers, or economists.
Beyond the political economy, there are many
reasons to question the FAO hunger estimates.
In particular, calorie intake is not the same thing
as the lack of physical and cognitive functioning
that can be threatened by inadequate diet, but
which is determined by other factors too, particularly
by the disease environment and by
the calorie demands of work. It is net nutrition,
the nutrition that is retained by the body after
December 2011 / Measure for Measure / How Well Do We Measure Development? / © AFD [ 37 ]