What are we measuring? Comparison of household food security indicators in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa

ASTRACT

The development of national food security information systems is constrained by a lack of guidance on which indicators to use. This paper compares food security indicators across two seasons (summer and winter) in one of the most deprived areas of the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. The results show that only anthropometric indicators are sensitive enough to differentiate levels of food insecurity. The lack of consistent classification across indicators means that surveys must use a combination of food consumption and experience of hunger measures backed up by anthropometric measures. Targeting interventions is difficult if the measures cannot be relied on. Further investigation is needed to identify a suite of appropriate indicators for a national information and surveillance system.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropometric indicators
• food insecurity
• food security indicators
• foodsecurity information system
• hunger
• indicators

Funding

This article is based on work that was part of a research project funded by the South African Water Research Commission (WRC Project No. Project K5/2172/4), the South African National Research Foundation (Grant numbers CPR20110706000020, 77053 and 80529), the University of Pretoria’s Institutional Research Theme on Food, Nutrition and Well-being, and the University of Pretoria’s Post-Doctoral Fellowship Programme. However, the authors accept responsibility for any opinions, findings, conclusions and recommendations contained in this article.

Notes

¹ The four surveys are the 1999 and 2005 National Food Consumption Surveys (Labadarios 2000; Labadarios et al. 2008), the South African Social SASAS (HSRC 2008), and the recent SANHANES (Shisana et al. 2013).

² The World Food Summit defines food security as the “physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet … dietary needs and food preferences for an active healthy life” (FAO 1996).

³ This index is a measure of relative deprivation of populations. It is derived from a set of demographic and socioeconomic variables obtained from the national survey data. Although it is not directly a food security indicator, many of the variables included are also indicators of food insecurity and poverty.

⁴ Frequency is calculated as follows: never = 0; hardly at all or one day a week = 1; 1–2 days a week or once in a while = 2; 3–6 days a week = 5; and every day = 7.

⁵ The coefficient of variability (CoV) provides insight into the shapes of the distributions and so of the level of inequality among the sample households (Cowell 2009; Maxwell, Vaitla, and Coates 2014). The higher the CoV, the “flatter” and more unequal the distribution.

Additional information

Funding

This article is based on work that was part of a research project funded by the South African Water Research Commission (WRC Project No. Project K5/2172/4), the South African National Research Foundation (Grant numbers CPR20110706000020, 77053 and 80529), the University of Pretoria’s Institutional Research Theme on Food, Nutrition and Well-being, and the University of Pretoria’s Post-Doctoral Fellowship Programme. However, the authors accept responsibility for any opinions, findings, conclusions and recommendations contained in this article.