The MDG on poverty and hunger : how reliable are the hunger estimates?

Of the eight Millennium Development Goals, the first goal addresses poverty and hunger. One of the two quantified targets is to halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger. To measure progress towards achieving this target, two indicators have been selected by the United Nations. The first indicator is the proportion of children below five years of age whose weight for age is below the WHO cut-off point for malnutrition. The second indicator is the proportion of the population whose food consumption is below minimum requirements (box 1). In this paper the first indicator will be referred to as "prevalence of underweight in children" or in short "prevalence of underweight", the second indicator will be referred to as "prevalence of undernourishment among the populcation" or in short "prevalence of undernourishment". By selecting these two indicators for monitoring progress it is implicitly assumed that there are tools and procedures for measuring them in a reliable and practical way. The first part of the present paper addresses to what the extent the two indicators are indeed "measurable" and "reliable", with emphasis on the first indicator, the prevalence of underweight among children. The second part of this paper has a closer look at this first indicator, which combines the effects of two distinct dimensions of child growth: (i) growth in body stature (length or height for age) and (ii) fluctuations in body proportions (weight for stature). This paper focuses on the merits of each of these indicators for monitoring purposes. The relationships of these indicators with indicators for other development targets and background conditions over time is an important other issue. The monitoring of MDG targets should serve a purpose, namely the appropriate interpretation of national trends, including the attribution of changes to likely explanatory factors (such as the impact of various policies, of economic opportunities or constraints and of both natural and man-made changes or disasters). These relationships are beyond the scope of this paper, which intends to be a first stepping stone by developing a new approach and a new tool as a basis for further analysis.