Multivariate analysis of food consumption profiles in crisis settings

Abstract

Preventing malnutrition is one of the primary objectives of many humanitarian agencies, and household surveys are regularly employed to monitor food insecurity caused by political, economic, or environmental crises. Consumption frequencies for standard food groups are often collected to characterize the depth of food insecurity in a community and measure the impact of food assistance programs, producing a vector of bounded, correlated counts for each household. While aggregate indicators are typically used to summarize these results with a single statistic, they can be difficult to interpret and provide insufficient detail to judge the effectiveness of assistance programs. To address these limitations, we have developed a multivariate modeling framework for consumption frequency data. We introduce methods to update baseline models for the analysis of the smaller and more variable surveys typically collected in crisis settings, and we present an application of our approach to national consumption data collected in Yemen in 2014 and 2016 by the World Food Programme. The approach provides more nuanced and interpretable information about consumption changes in response to shocks and the effectiveness of humanitarian assistance.

Nano-Food Farming: Toward Sustainable Applications of Proteins, Mushrooms, Nano-Nutrients, and Nanofibers

“…The new approaches are crucial for addressing the global food crisis through the application of proper nano-and/or bio-technologies along with integrated farming practices such as irrigation, fertilization, soil tillage, pre-and postharvest, and pest management. The global food crisis has several dimensions, including economic [77], water security [78], global pandemics [79][80][81], and food loss and waste issues [82].…”