Global Hunger Index: A survey that trivialised hunger

It is difficult to distinguish malnutrition from malnutrition and the FAO tends to equate food insecurity with malnutrition and equates it with hunger. With India’s subsidized food security schemes, hunger is not likely to be a problem. In fact, the National Sample Survey consumption surveys showed that nearly all households, rural and urban, reported receiving two full meals a day. The discourse must go from hunger to malnutrition. That is why India’s national indicator framework for the SDGs (developed by the Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation) has indicators such as underweight children under five, stunting and wasting, pregnant women and anemic children, women with low BMIs, and marginalized populations without access to subsidized food grains. To restate the obvious, as it is not often appreciated, what is true for children, or women, need not be true for the general population. When it comes to numbers, it’s best to remember this.

Then comes the GHI (Global Hunger Index), with a self-proclaimed peer-reviewed methodology. There are four indicators: malnutrition, child stunting, child wasting, and child mortality. Since these are the indicators, how accurate is it to call this a hunger index? One-sixth of the weight is given to child stunting, 1/6 to child wasting, 1/3 to child mortality, and 1/3 to undernutrition. The nomenclature of “hunger” is driven by malnutrition, which is of the entire population, not just children.

Why are such indices built? Presumably to influence politics. So there is a normative angle to such an exercise. It is not merely academic and intellectual. Under “politics,” we are given the somewhat vacuous blanket statement: “The 2022 GHI reflects both the alarming hunger scandal in too many countries around the world and the changing trajectory in countries where decades of progress in fighting hunger is being eroded. . .” There is no particular mention of children or women in this, suggesting that the intention of the policy is to emphasize hunger, not the other indicators, even if they feature in the index. All policy statements have value judgments. Is an increase in childhood stunting and wasting necessarily bad? Most people will probably automatically answer yes. However, infant and youth mortality have been declining simultaneously. Surely that’s a good thing. These are children who otherwise would have died. Now born, they are now likely to be underweight, stunted and emaciated, compared to the average and that will drive down the numbers.

If the methodology had truly been peer-reviewed, and not joy-reviewed, it is very likely that a critic would have suggested separating the indicators for the general population from those for children. That allows a mockery of politics, different for the two segments. For indicators related to children, we have numbers from NFHS-5 (National Family Health Survey), conducted between 2019 and 2021. The recent UNDP report on multidimensional poverty has used this to document the decline in poverty. Thus, one understands where the data for three of the four indicators comes from. The data comes from surveys, not from complete enumerations, as is the case with a census.

However, the NFHS sample size is large enough. Where did the FAO get data on malnutrition or hunger, the fourth indicator? This is not data that any standard survey gets numbers on. FAO decided to do its own survey, as it has done in the past, through its Food Insecurity Experience Scale Survey Module, which has eight questions. As most people already know, this survey was administered to a sample size of 3,000. In an age where a chat with a single taxi driver provides policy information, 3,000 might seem like a lot. But in a country like India, most people would laugh at this sample size.

” id=”yt-wrapper-box” >

Peer-reviewed or not, the questions seem strange to anyone who has written questionnaires. For example, question 8 says, as a question asked, “Did you go without food for a whole day due to lack of money or other resources?” This is good. But question 1 asks, “Were you worried about not having enough food to eat because of a lack of money or other resources?” There should be serious reservations on questions concerning the state of mind. It gets worse. Surely the questions were not asked in English. Yes, they were asked in Hindi. Question 6 asks, “Did your household go without food due to lack of money or other resources?” The Hindi translation, as asked, is “apke ghar mein bhojana ki kami ho gayi kyonki ghar mei paise ya anya samashadano ki kami thi”. “It’s over” means there is no food. “Kami” means less food. Answering yes to the question in Hindi is not the same as answering yes to the question in English.

This is more than mere semantics. It is a serious translation error. Such errors may be due to incompetence or may be deliberate. In an exercise that has been peer-reviewed and must have gone through successive iterations, incompetence and inadvertence are unlikely to be the answer. In any case, by propagating something like GHI, the FAO has done itself a great disservice, trivializing a serious issue, where cross-country surveys of hunger in other countries must also have been subject to serious anomalies.

The author is chairman of the PM Economic Advisory Council. views are personal