Many observers argue that the estimate was simply high. "The fact that it's one billion is a much better story, and that's why it stays in people's minds," said Richard King, a food policy expert with Oxfam. "It's a great number." The talk about figures created a controversy that led the Committee on World Food Security, a top-level UN forum, to encourage the FAO to repair its calculations using better data and methodology and better indicators.
A new estimate of the number of undernourished people will be published along with revisions for previous years as part of the FAO's annual report on food insecurity is due in October. The figures will include fresher data on world food supplies. The report will also incorporate supplementary indicators of hunger, such as the share of household budgets spent on food.
"If you only present one number, there is a tendency to over-interpret it and take it as if it were capturing everything, but we want to try and be more explicit in recognizing the various dimensions of food insecurity," said Carlo Cafiero, a senior FAO statistician. This is a very important step as nutritionists have long complained that the FAO's hunger estimates focused too narrowly on calorie intake, overlooking the bigger picture - protein, vitamin and mineral deficiencies in diets and the serious health problems that ensued.
This entails a new methodology of calculating the number of hungry people across the world at any given time. What is more difficult is to predict how that number is likely to change in the future. But experts note that there is are lags in the release of national-level statistics. Therefore, models for working out how many people don't have enough to eat are not as precize or forward-looking as experts would like to have. Added to this is the shifting economic conditions that can change the purchase power of the poor on daily basis.
Also prices increase all the time. The FAO came under pressure to decide how much hunger was increasing due to hikes in food prices and the global financial crisis that hit the world in late 2008. To respond to this pressure, the FAO decided to combine US Department of Agriculture projections of how economic turmoil would hurt food production, consumption and trade with its own hunger estimates of preceding years, and deduce from there. The conclusion is bleak. The FAO estimated the existence of some 1.02 billion undernourished people in 2009. But in 2010, FAO forecast a drop to 925 million undernourished people and in 2011 it didn't produce a number at all due to the conflict over the methods employed.
There is always a problem of how to collect, interpret and share the data to present a realistic and accurate picture of the food security situation. Therefore the question is not if metrics are necessary. Experts confirm the need for improving the method used to calculate hunger people. They say that it could have had far-reaching consequences for the way governments and aid agencies respond more effectively to hunger crises. "We have a responsibility to bring the view from the field ... to make sure it's not just a technical exercise, but reflects the reality on the ground," said Alberta Guerra, a Rome-based food policy officer for Action Aid. For instance, in Nairobi's slums, when the cost of food rose in 2008, many poor families stopped buying meat and fish, took their children out of school and went without medicine. Things went bad when in post-election violence erupted. Amid this environment some stole food, scavenged in garbage dumps, brewed illegal alcohol or turned to prostitution to survive.
Experts said that numbers should be translated into policy. Frequent, on-the-ground checks are fare more effective at predicting hunger problems according to Nyauma Nyasani, East Africa nutrition adviser for Action Against Hunger. In the final analysis, it is not data, but action, that makes a difference. "Whoever tells you the data let us down doesn't know what they are talking about," said Saul Guerrero, an adviser with Action Against Hunger. "It was the final bit that didn't work - turning data into policy. This is the question no one has the full answer to," she said
