Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN Forum)

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    • Dear Evariste and Paola,

      Congratulations on the zero draft which I do believe covers the key issues. Regarding the specific questions, I am pleased that the report aims to address the additional dimensions of agency and sustainability, but I do feel it falls short on agency (which is admittedly a challenge).

      Specifically regarding our area of expertise, I have only a few brief comments on the evidence regarding food insecurity in urban and peri-urban areas. It is essential to have a good grasp of the data on food insecurity by degree of urbanization – the evolution in measurement and monitoring, the limitations, the challenges. For example, reference to (and the chart from) a 2017 academic publication in Section 3.2.1 should be removed given the updated information provided in the 2023 SOFI.

      It would be useful to directly address the different measures and urban-rural disaggregation approaches, pointing out that countries use different approaches, and that therefore national estimates are typically not comparable. The DEGURBA categorization used in Chapter 2 of SOFI 2023 is a new international standard endorsed by the UN Statistical Commission (see Box 2 of the SOFI 2023).

      We stand by to provide support on these parts of the report as needed.

      Please note there is nothing in the SOFI 2023 about lower access to school food programs contributing to the gender gap in food insecurity.

      Section 3.2 could be synthesized better with care taken regarding the timeliness, quality and generalizability of the evidence. In our experience from analyses of food insecurity severity (based on the FIES) across Urban Rural Catchment Areas, the results were extremely heterogeneous, pointing to the different realities in different contexts and the difficulty of making generalizations.

      Best regards.

      Anne W. Kepple

      Consultant

      Food Security & Nutrition Statistics Team

      Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO)

    • Greetings colleagues and thank you for your hard work. I hope the attached comments will be helpful. In summary, I encourage the authors to: 1) adopt a more updated conceptual understanding of the link between information and policy; 2) clarify the relationships between food security (specifically, access to food at the individual or household level), food consumption, and nutritional outcomes (and the data and methodologies associated with each); 3) distinguish between global/regional data and decision-making and national/local data and decision-making; 4) incorporate discussions of the important contributions of qualitative/ethnographic/interpretivist research and data and of citizen science.

      Best regards,

      Anne Kepple

      See the attachments: