Global Hunger Index: A Lesson in How Not to Measure Hunger

Why in News?

• The recently released Global Hunger Index report ranked India 107 out of 123 countries, dropping from the rank of 101 in 2021.
• The government has rejected the report, claiming it is an effort to 'taint' India and questioning its methodology and noting the substantial efforts made by the government to improve access to foodgrains by India’s poor.

 

About Global Hunger Index (GHI)

• Description: The GHI is an annual publication and was started in 2006 by Welthungerhilfe (private aid agency in Germany) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
  • In 2018, IFPRI stopped being a publisher. Since then the GHI has been brought out by two European NGOs, Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide.
  • The 2022 edition marks the 17th edition of the Global Hunger Index 2022.
• Objective: To comprehensively measure and track hunger at global, regional, and national levels.
• Yardstick: The index rests on four indicators as follows:
  • Undernourishment: The share of the population whose caloric intake is insufficient. This is closest to the everyday notion of hunger. This makes up 1/3 of the GHI score.
  • Child stunting: The share of children under the age of five who have low height for their age, reflecting chronic undernutrition. This makes up 1/6 of the GHI score.
  • Child wasting: The share of children under the age of five who have low weight for their height, reflecting acute undernutrition. This makes up 1/6 of the GHI score.
  • Child mortality: The share of children who die before their fifth birthday, reflecting in part the fatal mix of inadequate nutrition and unhealthy environments. This makes up 1/3 of the GHI score.
• Scores: The overall score is placed on a 100-point scale and a lower score is better (0 means no hunger).

 

Concerns related to India in the Index

• Serious category: A score between 20 and 34.9 is pegged in the “serious” category and this is where India finds itself with a total score of 1.
  • India has been ranked behind all south Asian countries except the war-torn Afghanistan.
• Worst global picture: The worrisome picture is of the trend on child wasting where India has slid back to a level worse than what it was three decades ago.
  • Child Wasting: India’s child wasting rate (low weight for height), at 3%, is worse than the levels recorded in 2014 (15.1%) and even 2000 (17.15%).
  • It is the highest for any country in the world and drives up the region’s average owing to India’s large population.
• Undernourishment: Prevalence of undernourishment has also risen in India from 6% in 2018-2020 to 16.3% in 2019-2021.
  • This translates into 224.3 million people in India considered undernourished out of the total 828 million people undernourished globally.
• Child Stunting: India has shown improvement- child stunting has declined from 7% to 35.5% between 2014 and 2022.
• Child mortality: Child mortality has also dropped from 6% to 3.3% between 2014 and 2022.

 

Reasons for backlash by government

• This is the second year running when the Indian government has criticised the GHI
• The government’s contention is based on three grounds as follows:
• Hunger definition: The GHI uses “an erroneous measure of hunger” as it defines hunger in terms of other variables beyond the lack of food.
• Not holistic: The 3 out of the 4 variables used are related to children, and as such, cannot be representative of the entire population.
• Small sample size: The fourth indicator, i.e. the proportion of undernourished population rests on the Food and Agricultural Organisation’s estimates which is in turn based on an opinion poll conducted on a very small sample size of 3000 (Gallup World Poll’s survey).
• Insensitivity: The government also argued that the report chooses to deliberately ignore efforts made by the Government to ensure food Security for the population like additional free-of-cost food-grains to 80 crore Indians since March 2020, over and above the entitlements under the National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013.

 

Questioning the index

• Evaluating sample representativeness: In addition to its small size, the Gallup sampling methodology does not follow the usual processes used in India.
  • Also, given that FAO has not released standard errors for their estimates, it is difficult to evaluate whether the growth in the proportion of households experiencing hunger in India, from 14.8 per cent in 2013-15 to 16.3 per cent in 2019-21, is statistically significant, given the difficulties in collecting data during the pandemic.
• Lack of conceptual clarity: Global Hunger Index is riddled with inadequate and poorly described data.
  • The index raises doubts if it is genuinely measuring hunger, or is it lumping together various indicators with only a weak relationship with hunger.

• No comprehensive picture: The problem with GHI is that it directs governmental attention to cross-national comparisons, sometimes resulting in the rejection of underlying issues and sidetracking the public discourse.
• Indicators not essentially hunger-related: While undernourishment could presumably identify the proportion experiencing hunger, but the latter three i.e. stunting, wasting and mortality are only partially related to hunger. It is demonstrated as follows:
• Demonstration: Child mortality depends heavily on a country’s disease climate and public health system
  • Today, 40 of 1,000 children in India die before their fifth birthday; 27 of these deaths occur in the first month of life.
  • This hints that many child deaths are associated with conditions surrounding birth, congenital conditions, or delivery complications and are not necessarily markers of hunger.
• Poverty not the only cause: UNICEF notes in an article titled ‘Stop Stunting, that there are stunted children even among the wealthiest households. Thus, poverty is not a clear cause of stunting.
  • Various factors contribute to stunting, such as infant and child care practices, hygiene, dietary diversity and cultural practices surrounding maternal diet during pregnancy.
  • Also wasting is associated with both illnesses and low food intake, not necessarily hunger. For example, children suffering from diarrhoea are less likely to eat, and poor nutritional status makes them more susceptible to disease.
• Different trends for different indicators: Between 1998-99 and 2019-21, National Family Health Survey 2 and 5 show that the child mortality rate fell from 95 deaths per thousand to 40 per thousand. This is a significant improvement attributable to improved immunisation coverage and increased hospital delivery.
  • Child stunting decline was also substantial, from 51.5 per cent to 35.5 per cent, possibly due to improved water and sanitation systems.
  • Wasting has not changed, barely budging from 19.5 per cent to 19.3 per cent.

 

Way forward

• Apart from average caloric intake as a nutrition indicator, close attention needs to be paid to other aspects of food deprivation, such as the intake of vitamins and minerals, fat consumption, the diversity of the diet, and breastfeeding practices.
• Also, to ensure transparency, it is essential that international agencies only use data that are freely available in the public domain along with key characteristics such as education, residence and age of the respondents.

 

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Source: Global Hunger Index: A Lesson in How Not to Measure Hunger