Validating Operational Food Insecurity Indicators against a Dynamic Benchmark Evidence from Mali

Household food insecurity indicators are typically static in nature, thereby ignoring a key dimension of food insecurity. This paper develops an explicitly forward-looking food insecurity indicator that takes into account both current dietary inadequacy and vulnerability to dietary inadequacy in the future. Application of this measure to data from northern Mali shows that neglecting the future dimension of food insecurity causes us to seriously underestimate this population’s food insecurity. Relative to our dynamic benchmark, we further evaluate the performance of three readily available alternative indicators: an agricultural production, a dietary diversity, and a coping strategy index. Despite their uneven performance with respect to the individual components of the benchmark, they all demonstrate strong associations with the dynamic food insecurity indicator developed in this paper. This is a promising result, given the urgent demand for reliable and operational food insecurity indicators. Corresponding author : Luc Christiaensen, World Bank, 1818 H Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20433, phone: 202-458-1463, fax: 202-473-7913, email: [email protected] *Luc J. Christiaensen is an agricultural economist with the Poverty Reduction and Social Development Unit of the Africa Region in the World Bank. Richard N. Boisvert is professor in the Department of Agricultural, Resource, and Managerial Economics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. John Hoddinott is a Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington D.C. The Belgian American Education Foundation, Fulbright, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (TA Grant No. 301-IFPRI), USAID/Mali (TA Grant No. 301-IFPRI), the International Food Policy Research Institute, Cornell University and the World Bank all provided funding for this research at various stages. We gratefully acknowledge this funding, but stress that the ideas and opinions presented here are our responsibility. We also express our gratitude to our Malian collaborators Sidi Guindo, Abdourhamane Maiga and Mamadou Nadio, and the helpful cooperation of our respondents. Validating Operational Food Insecurity Indicators against a Dynamic Benchmark: Evidence from Mal