Measuring Food Security Using Household Expenditure Surveys: A Comparison of Quantity and Quality Indicators for Ghana, Malawi, and Uganda

Abstract

Food security exists when " all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life"(FAO 1996, p.1083). Achieving Sustainable food security in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) could be quite a challenge to the ultimate objective of a "hunger free" World. Food security is certainly one of the most complex and multi-dimensional issues of our times in the region, and it is an important measure of development. The general topic of this thesis is the measurement of food security. The general question this thesis asks is: if we include both diet quantity and diet quality in a set of food security indicators, what difference does it make for targeting food-insecure populations and the types of policies needed to reduce food insecurity? Specifically, this thesis investigates two indicators of food security using data from national Household Expenditure Surveys (HESs) conducted in three Sub-Saharan Africa countries in the late 1990s: Ghana, Malawi and Uganda. The two indicators are: household calorie availability, a measure of the quantity of food people eat, and diet diversity, a measure of the quality of that food. Two questions are explored: (1) Do the indicators tell us different things about who in a population is food insecure and the prevalence of food insecurity? And (2) Do they have different determinants? To answer the first question, correlation analysis and contingency tables are employed. To answer the second, community fixed-effects regression analysis (Ordinary Least Squares and Two-stage Least Squares) is employed.