اندازه گیری امنیت غذایی در یک مفهوم جهانی: مقیاس تجربی ناامنی غذایی Food security measurement in a global context: The food insecurity experience scale

1. Introduction Food security is said to exist 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 [1]. Although food security is inherently multi-dimensional, one critical dimension is continued access to adequate food. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has undertaken a project called Voices of the Hungry (VoH) to develop and support a survey-based experiential measure of access to food, called the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES). The approach to measuring households’ ability to access food is similar to that of other experiencebased food security scales such as the US Household Food Security Survey Module (HFSSM), the Escala Brasileira de Insegurança Alimentar (EBIA), the Escala Latinoamericana y Caribena de Seguridad Alimentaria (ELCSA), the Escala Mexicana de Seguridad Alimentaria (EMSA) and the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) used in the United States, Brazil, Canada, Mexico and several other countries to monitor food security in the context of large national programs [2]. The innovation brought about by the VoH project is the possibility to calibrate the measures with the FIES or with any of these other scales and the thresholds used for classification, against a standard reference scale, thus ensuring proper comparability of the estimated prevalence rates and the possibility to compute consistent estimates at regional and global level, an essential feature for an indicator to be used in the context of global monitoring frameworks. Following a very broad consultation with many stakeholders, the FIES was chosen as the basis to compile indicator 2.1.2, one of the two indicators included in the global SDG indicator framework put forth by the Interagency and Expert Group on SDG indicators (IAEG-SDG) of the United Nations Statistical Commission to monitor Target 2.1 of the recently adopted 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development [3].