Identifying Food Insecurity with Enhanced Monitoring and Reporting

The United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. SDG2 addresses food security. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN defines food security as, “…when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” While defining food security may be easy, measuring food security and ultimately acting on it is complicated. Food security is typically measured across four dimensions: availability of food, access to food, utilization of food, and stability of food supply. Within these dimensions, many factors can undermine food security, such as economic instability, human conflict, lack of farming resources, and climate and geographic changes. Disruptions in food production and affordability resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic have rolled back development gains that had been made by many countries prior to the pandemic, amplifying drivers of fragility and conflict. In the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) Region alone, as of July 2020 the World Food Programme estimated up to 16 million people were facing severe food insecurity, up from 4.3 million in 2019. To have a holistic picture of food insecurity in a country, multiple contributing factors need to be quantified and analyzed. Agreeing on a common set of numbers is challenging, because many international development organizations, such as the World Food Programme, FAO, and the World Bank, collect their own sets of food security data. The multiple data sources, dissimilar formats, different frequencies of collection, and varying levels of quality exacerbate the problem of being able to identify early declines in food security. World Bank staff are able to make use of the available data, but further enhancements would help meet long-term needs for systematic analysis and interpretation of the data, which is critical for understanding the drivers of food insecurity. Importantly, more robust analytical capacity would enable World Bank country teams to more quickly and effectively identify emerging food insecurity hotspots and mobilize appropriate responses.