Food Security最新文献

Unhealthy diets are among the main risk factors associated with non-communicable diseases (NCDs). In Sub Saharan Africa, NCDs were responsible for 37% of deaths in 2019, rising from 24% in 2000. There is an increasing emphasis on health-harming industrial foods, such as ultra-processed foods (UPFs), in driving the incidence of diet-related NCDs. However, there is a methodological gap in food systems research to adequately account for the processes and actors that shape UPFs consumption across the different domains of the food systems framework and macro-meso-micro levels of analysis. This paper interrogates how the Food Systems Framework for Improved Nutrition (HLPE in Nutrition and food systems. A report by the high level panel of experts on food security and nutrition of the committee on world food security, 2017), considered the dominant framework to analyse nutrition, and language of interdisciplinarity are practised in research with regards to consumption of UPFs among adolescents in Ghana, a population group that is often at the forefront of dramatic shifts in diets and lifestyles. We conducted a scoping review of studies published between 2010 and February 2022, retrieved 25 studies, and mapped the findings against the domains and analysis levels of the Food Systems Framework for Improved Nutrition (HLPE in Nutrition and food systems. A report by the high level panel of experts on food security and nutrition of the committee on world food security, 2017). Our study illustrates that there is a tendency to address unhealthy diets among adolescents in a siloed manner, and as a behavioural and nutritional issue. In most cases, the analyses fail to show how domains of the food systems framework are connected and do not account for linkages across different levels of analysis. Methodologically, there is a quantitative bias. From the policy point of view, there is a disconnect between national food policies and food governance (i.e., trade and regulations) and initiatives and measures specifically targeted at adolescent’s food environments and the drivers of UPFs consumption.

In-kind food transfers are widely used in many developing countries to address food insecurity, yet undernutrition remains a key problem. In this paper, we combine nationally representative administrative and household survey data from Indonesia, to evaluate whether the replacement of means-tested in-kind food transfers (Rastra program which delivered staple cereal rice) by a food voucher system (BPNT program) changed the consumption behaviour of the poor. Our analyses show that the BPNT program increased dietary diversity among poor households, by at least 15 percentage points relative to those households that still received in-kind food transfers. Further, the new initiative has also improved the consumption of essential nutrients by poor households and the targeting performance of social welfare programs. Our results highlight the importance of social protection reform and show that changing such in-kind programs to vouchers provide poor households with greater flexibility to choose the foods of their choice.

Physical and economic access to food vary spatially. Methods to map that variability at high levels of spatial detail over large areas are scarce, even though suitable datasets and methods exist. Using open-access data for Ethiopia, we developed a method to map the disparities in physical and economic food access at 1-km resolution. We selected 25 access-related variables for 486 geo-located communities from the 2018 Ethiopian Living Standards Measurement Study to create a food access index (FAI). The index was based on a weighted summation of the 25 variables from a principal component analysis (PCA). We then extrapolated the FAI to the rest of Ethiopia using a generalized additive model (GAM) to produce a 1-km resolution FAI map and used that to describe the spatial variability of food access. Economic access had a heavier weight than physical access in the FAI reflecting the fact that proximity to food markets alone is insufficient if one cannot afford food. The GAM had an R² of 0.57 and a normalized root mean square error of 22.2% which are comparable to measures of model performance in studies that provided micro-level estimates of relative wealth. Peri-urban areas, representing 67% of the population, had relatively low food access, suggesting that these areas should be a priority for infrastructure or economic intervention. The scarcity of detailed spatial information on food access may limit the effectiveness of targeted policymaking to improve food security. The methodology developed in this study uses widely available and carefully selected datasets and can contribute to more spatially detailed estimates of food access in other countries.

There is growing recognition that water insecurity – the inability to reliably access sufficient water for all household uses – is commonly experienced globally and has myriad adverse consequences for human well-being. The role of water insecurity in food insecurity and diet quality, however, has received minimal attention. Data are from panel surveys conducted during 2020–21 among adults involved in smallholder agriculture in Niger (n = 364, 3 rounds), Nigeria (n = 501, 5 rounds), Senegal (n = 501, 5 rounds), and Ghana (n = 543, 5 rounds). We hypothesized that household water insecurity (measured using the brief Household Water Insecurity Experiences Scale) would be associated with greater individual food insecurity (using 5 of the 8 Food Insecurity Experiences Scale items) and lower dietary diversity (using the Minimum Dietary Diversity Score for Women). At baseline, 37.1% of individuals were living in water-insecure households and of these, 90.6% had some experience of food insecurity. In multilevel mixed-effects regressions, individuals living in water-insecure households had 1.67 (95% CI: 1.47, 1.89) times higher odds of reporting any food insecurity experience and were estimated to consume 0.38-fewer food groups (95% CI: -0.50, -0.27) than those living in water-secure households. Experiences with suboptimal water access and use are associated with poor nutrition. The pathways by which water insecurity impacts nutrition should be identified. Global and national food and nutrition security policies could be strengthened by monitoring and developing strategies to address household water insecurity.