Measuring Food Access as Affordability of Least-Cost Healthy Diets Worldwide

Abstract

Since 2020, the World Bank, FAO, and others have measured a population's access to sufficient nutritious food for an active and healthy life using a new metric known as the Cost and Affordability of a Healthy Diets (CoAHD). This new kind of data measures food access using market prices of the least expensive locally available items that would meet nutritional criteria adopted by national governments, as summarized in a Healthy Diet Basket (HDB) level of intake balanced among six complementary food groups: starchy staples, vegetables, fruits, fats and oils, animal source foods, and legumes, nuts and seeds. CoAHD reflects the definition of food security introduced during the World Food Summit of 1996, and complements the earlier measures of global food security notably Prevalence of Undernourishment (PoU) based on total national availability and intake distribution of calories, and the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) based on survey data asking whether a household ran out of resources to acquire their usual diets. This paper briefly discusses the evolution of global food security measurement, then highlights updates to the methods used to compute CoAHD indicators and presents newly available CoAHD data obtained using this methodology and updated price data.