ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the interplay between conceptual/theoretical and practical/empirical considerations to be made when defining an indicator of the adequacy of food consumption. It presents existing indicators based, respectively, on food consumption and food insecurity experiences data, discussing the respective merits and drawbacks in terms of validity, reliability, cost effectiveness and timeliness. The value of an indicator of access to food depends on the extent to which it can reveal if and where there may problems in accessing food and which members of a population are facing this food insecurity. The scarcity of large-scale individual dietary intake surveys, particularly in the developing world, has led to the identification of alternative sources of food consumption data for food security assessments. The economy of resource use, timeliness and ease of application, rather than statistical validity, seem to have been the major elements determining the popularity of the use of those indicators in the past decade.
