<\/p>\n
\u00abHow many meals have you eaten in the course of the last week? And how many of them included bread or cereals, how many fruits or vegetables?\u00bb<\/em><\/p>\n These or similar questions may be used to get an impression about food security, a concept that was defined by the World Food Summit of 1996 as a situation in which \u201call people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life\u201d. This thereby includes both physical and economic access to food that meets people’s nutritional needs as well as their food preferences.\u00a0So much for the theory.<\/p>\n The main task for our EU Aid team in Haiti is the design and development of a monitoring system that enables our local host organization to conveniently measure and assess the food security conditions in a certain region. For the first weeks we sifted numberless studies about food security in general and the local conditions in particular. Subsequently we started developing the instruments, basically consisting of a questionnaire and a related database. We designed them as intuitive\u00a0and self-explanatory as possible to make sure they can easily be used after our departure. For the same purpose we are writing an accompanying manual, which explains the survey system\u2019s structure and handling in detail.<\/p>\n We are now in the final spurt: In recent weeks we made several trips to the countryside, where we talked to farmers, stockbreeders and fishermen to test our questionnaire in practice. We were already aware of many difficulties concerning the design of the questions in advance. Nevertheless, the practical test revealed many others, that made us ultimately reformulate, rearrange or completely modify well over half of our questionnaire. This is mainly because the wording of many questions fails to correspond with the reality of people\u2019s everyday life and the information you actually want to know is often hard to get. A few examples:<\/p>\n Data about the usual crop yields allows a clear view of the general supply situation and the agricultural productivity. Asking for the amount of the last harvest, one would habitually expect an answer in kilograms, pounds or tons. However, the measurements used by local farmers are \u201cbaskets\u201d, \u201cpots\u201d, \u201csmall bags\u201d or \u201cbig bags\u201d. The eventual challenge is to bring these measurements in correlation with each other to make them comparable.<\/p>\n From the beginning we have been asking for the tools that are used in agriculture and fishing in order to get an impression which techniques and equipment are commonly used. Recently, we have added a question concerning tools, that would be helpful, but which are not at disposal. To our confusion, exactly the same tools were mentioned as before. Only on demand, we realized that although the tools are actually used, many people don\u2019t possess them. Instead, they borrow them from others. We would have almost overlooked that.<\/span><\/p>\n Also, the temporal frame of reference is a challenge: Which reference do you choose to determine the number of births per cow? Or what time frame is adequate to ask for the revenues and expenditures per household? Expenditure on school fees and health are better identified based on six months or a whole year, but expenditure on food is in contrast hard to tell for the same time frame. Furthermore, if you want to find out the nutritional habits: Who really remembers how many full meals one has eaten in the last week? And above all, how do you define a full meal?<\/span><\/p>\n Anyhow, after many considerations and corrections we are now quite satisfied with the design of our questionnaire, although some minor difficulties still need to be solved. Moreover, we are still not sure to what extent our survey system can actually reflect the reality of the local people\u2019s everyday life. But we have definitely made an effort to come as close to the practice as possible.<\/p>\n \u00a0written by Simon Bettighofer<\/em><\/p>\n \n\t\t