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Estimating Food Consumption Patterns by Reconciling Food Balance Sheets and Household Budget Surveys

dec/14

Year of publication 2014

Place of publication Rome, Italy ;

Pages 31 p.

Author Grünberger, K.;Statistics Division

Publisher FAO ;

Product type Document

Series title Working Paper

Series number 1014-1960

Edition 1

Synopsis (short abstract) Food Balance Sheets (FBS) are one of the most important sources of data on food availability for human consumption. This paper presents a method to improve the information on food consumption patterns of FBS by using national household budget surveys (HBS). In this paper, food commodities are categorized into 16 major food groups. For each food group, the contribution to the overall caloric intake is represented in shares. Item group shares of 64 surveys from 51 low and middle income countries are compared with shares from country-specific FBS. Given the countries represented in the data, the analysis evaluates food consumption of over 3 billion persons worldwide. A model based on a cross-entropy measure of information has been developed in order to reconcile aggregate food consumption patterns suggested by FBS and HBS. The latter model accounts for the fact that data from both data sources are prone to measurement errors. Overall, the results of the reconciliation suggest that aver age consumption of cereals, eggs, fish products, pulses and vegetables are likely to be underestimated in FBS, while fruits, meat, milk and sugar products are likely to be overestimated in FBS. Even though the suggested changes in average food consumption are moderate, the results imply considerable relative changes in the aggregate consumption of single food groups. Furthermore, the results imply that the aggregate consumption of fats is 2% higher than currently assumed. The updated consumption patterns provide valuable information from an agro-industrial perspective. Differences in updated consumption pattern with respect to the original FBS might suggest a re-evaluation of FBS elements of the value chain, starting from production and ending at food losses.

Language English

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