A methodology for measuring food poverty applied to Kenya

Abstract

This paper proposes a new way of establishing a food poverty line taking into account regional food preferences and prices. It uses this poverty line to derive a food poverty measure which satisfies the desirable fundamental properties of such measures and has the additional advantage of being additively decomposable. The measurement of food poverty is further generalized to heterogeneous groups of households facing different sets of relative prices and exhibiting different food preferences. Finally, the above methodology is applied to the empirical estimation of food poverty among Kenyan smallholders, and the results contrasted with those obtained by two other methods.