Are the World Food Programme’s food consumption groups a good proxy for energy deficiency?

Abstract

The Food Consumption Score (FCS) is the World Food Programme’s main food access indicator, a proxy for household diet quantity and quality. The score is based on the number of days in a week eight food groups were eaten, and thresholds classify households as having poor, borderline or acceptable food consumption. The ability of the FCS and its thresholds to classify household’s consumption consistently are vital as food assistance is directed towards areas and population groups where prevalence of inadequate food consumption is high. As there are indications that the current thresholds underestimate inadequate consumption, this paper asks whether FCS thresholds can be identified corresponding to inadequate energy consumption, the quantity dimension of the score. The analysis uses household survey data that include comprehensive modules on food consumption as well as the information necessary to calculate the FCS from six countries. The results show that the FCS is significantly but not highly correlated with calorie intake. Not counting foods eaten in small quantities, clearly improves the association between the FCS and caloric intake, but the analysis suggests that in practice it is difficult to exclude the small quantities. Established sensitivity and specificity criteria for suitable thresholds are not met and this paper concludes that it is not appropriate to identify FCS thresholds that adequately correspond to caloric thresholds. The analysis illustrates that the FCS depicts both quantitative and qualitative aspects of food consumption and concludes that a future strategy should be to anchor thresholds in an indicator comprising both these dimensions.