Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Food Insecurity Around the Globe: A First Look at the Food and Agriculture Organization's Food Insecurity Experience Scale Data

(Poverty and Income Policy)

In 2014, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations sponsored the inclusion of the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) in the Gallup World Poll (GWP) as part of the Voices of the Hungry project. Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life (Committee on World Food Security, 2009). The FIES is the first global experiential measure of food insecurity. The FIES measure relies on respondent's self-reports of difficulty obtaining adequate food and is a direct measure of food access (for more information: http://www.fao.org/economic/ess/ess-fs/voices/en/). Food insecurity data, along with demographic characteristics and other well-being indexes are available in the GWP for 147 countries around the world. The GWP FIES data first became available in September 2015 to researchers that were granted access to a limited number of data licenses by FAO through a competitive call for proposals. This panel includes four papers highlighting some of the first analyses of the GWP FIES data. The four papers all focus on food insecurity from different vantage points. One aims to identify global determinants of food insecurity for the 147 countries included in the GWP. Another focuses on the gender gap in food insecurity to understand why women are generally more likely than men to experience food insecurity. The third examines food insecurity in the Arab region by national income level. The final paper employs weather data to examine the impact of weather and production shocks on food insecurity and income. A discussant from FAO who has been involved with the development of the FIES data will comment on the studies.