Better measurement of food insecurity in the context of enhancing nutrition1

Access to enough nutritionally adequate food is a basic need shared by all human beings. In 1949, the right to adequate food was declared a basic human right. It was only during the Rome World Food Summit in 1996 that the discussion on the right to food was revitalized, and it took another eight years before the “Voluntary Guidelines to support the progressive realization of the right to adequate food in the context of national food security” were established in order to draw the world’s attention to this basic human right.

To monitor implementation of this human right, it is particularly important to provide timely and valid information regarding the prevalence of food insecurity in populations world-wide. The FAO “Voices of the Hungry” project² aims to take a step closer to meeting this demand.

The “Voices of the Hungry” project

The FAO Voices of the Hungry (VOH) project is developing an experience-based measure called the Food Insecurity Experience scale – FIES (
Box 1) [1]. The FIES is a tool that allows direct measurement of people’s access to food, derived from two widely-used and validated experience-based food security scales: the US Household Food Security Survey Module and the Latin American and Caribbean Food Security Food Security Scale (Spanish acronym – ELCSA) [2]. It represents a significant change in approach to food insecurity measurement compared to traditional ways of assessing it indirectly through determinants such as food availability or consequences such as poor quality diets, anthropometric failures and other signs of malnutrition.

¹For purposes of international publication slightly altered version of the German article.
²The FAO ”Voices of the Hungry” project as a new approach to measure hunger was introduced in Ernährungs Umschau 05/2013, p. M254.

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