Evaluating Household Food Insecurity: Applications and Insights from Rural Malaysia

Abstract

Hunger is complex, encompassing experiences ranging from a family's forced acceptance of a monotonous diet to individual physiological pain. I evaluate the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) as a means of capturing the universal elements of hunger without doing violence to its culturally-specific expressions within two Malay communities. The HFIAS is assessed conceptually by comparing its assumptions and concept-to-measurement gap with competing indicators and practically with respect to village conditions and practices. This case study recommends the HFIAS for this site and for communities that similarly lack maternal buffering, while highlighting the unique features of the local hunger experience.

Keywords:

• Borneo
• food insecurity
• hunger
• measurement
• Sarawak

Notes

¹All names are pseudonyms.

²The World Health Organization (WHO) nutritional profile submitted by Parman (2009), provides two separate (and contradictory) estimates of child nutritional status: (1) the 2002 National Nutrition Survey, which states that 12.6% of children under five-years-old are moderately to severely underweight—reduced from 16.0% in 1999—and (2) a cross-sectional, household study from 1999 (n = 5,108) that classifies 19.0% of children less than five-years-old as underweight, 15.6% as stunted, and 13.3% as wasted. Results from the latter indicate that within Sarawak, 19.4% of children were underweight, 14.6% stunted, and 8.9% wasted. UNICEF (2007, 121) records a national underweight prevalence of 8.0%, and the WHO Global Database on Child Growth and Malnutrition (n.d.) states that updated information for Malaysia in no longer available.

³See Anderson (1990) and FAO (1996).

⁴See Himmelgreen and Romero-Daza (2010).

⁵Translations of the Radimer-Cornell have been used within Malaysia, yet their applicability and relative success is questionable (see Discussion).

⁶ Frongillo (1999) argues for the consistency of response patterns by assessing Radimer-Cornell item results in upstate New York, Quebec, and Connecticut. When Coates and colleagues (2006) compare response frequencies at the global level, inconsistencies emerge in the relative severity of domains of worry, eating lower food quality, eating less food, and “feeling hungry.”

⁷The University of South Florida IRB waived written informed consent based on the study's status as minimal risk and the limited literacy and documented suspicion of foreign academics in this setting.

⁸These informants were typically women in their child-bearing years who self-identified as housewives.

⁹SECA 210 measuring mat used for children 6–23 months (n = 37); SECA Road Rod 214 portable stadiometer used for children over 23 months (n = 67). SR241 portable weigh system used for all children. Measurements were determined to the nearest 0.1 centimeter and 0.1 kilogram respectively.

¹⁰For children without healthcards or clinic listings, age was verified by eliciting their date of birth from two separate household members on two separate occasions. Four identical reports were accepted as validation.

¹¹Malay version available upon request.

¹²SHD guidelines were reviewed onsite in Kuching in October 2008 and were last updated in 2004. Reported MOH standards are state-specific and documented by Palaniyappan (2007).

¹³Manuscript under review.