Food Balance sheet

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Food Balance sheet Applications and
uses James Geehan, Statistician FAO, Rome
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• Recap definition of Food Balance Sheets
• The "Handbook for the Preparation of Food
  Balance Sheets" was published in 1949. Since
  then, FBS have been prepared and published by FAO
  on a regular basis.
• Food Balance Sheets measure the average food
  availability for a specific referenced period.
• They do not directly measure food intake or
  consumption due to wastage within the household
  (e.g., plate wastage). FBS should therefore be
  considered as measuring the average food
  available for human consumption.
• They are extracted out of time series SUAs and
  report a single year (or an average over a number
  of years), multiplying the food available by the
  nutritive factors, to access the calories,
  protein and fat per caput available to the
  general population.

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Recap differences between SUA and FBS
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Supply Utilization Accounts are interrogated
electronically and held in database form.
Food balance sheets are a summary report,
available electronically or published as a hard
copy.
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Food Balance Sheet - limitations 1. FBS do not
take account of seasonal variations. Annual
calorie intake can be misleading, hiding periods
of food surplus shortfall. 2. FBS only shows
average consumption in the population. They do
not tell us anything about differences in the
consumption patterns of different groups within
the population, e.g., by age, gender, economic
groups, or spatial variation across
ecological/geographical areas. 3. Data quality
often there is infrequent or no data for many of
the commodities. Particularly in the developing
world, many countries do not send any data on
production or trade. These data gaps, or
estimated data, cannot be perceived directly from
the FBS results. 4. The accuracy of FBS is only
as good as the underlying basic statistics of
population, supply and utilization of foods and
nutritive value data of various foods.
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Food Balance Sheet limitations (continued) 5.
Missing data some countries do not declare trade
of certain commodities due to cultural or
religious sensitivities (e.g., alcohol). How do
we account for them the FBS? 6. Inconsistent
data Even among developed countries, despite
abundant official data, information reported by
different agencies is often not consistent. 7.
Interpreting FBS results FBS measure calorie
intake prior to cooking and consumption (i.e.,
the quantities of food quantities reaching the
consumer). The amount of food actually consumed
may be lower than the quantity shown depending on
the degree of losses of edible food and nutrients
in the household. THERE IS NO COUNTRY WITH A
PERFECT SUA / FBS!
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• Food Balance Sheets advantages
• Nevertheless the FBS still provides the most
  comprehensive picture of supply and utilization
  of a countrys food supply.
• FBS are extremely useful for economists,
  planners, and health experts, despite the
  difficulties in obtaining accurate data and
  interpreting the results.
• FBS over a period of years show overall trends in
  the national food supply, changes in types of
  food consumed, and reveal the extent to which
  food supply as a whole is adequate in relation to
  nutritional requirements.
• They are a powerful means of bringing together
  from different sources, information about a food
  economy and are excellent for showing very broad
  changes in a food economy over time.

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• Food Balance Sheets advantages (continued)
• In some cases, they can be used to identify
  important gaps in the available data, or even
  contradictory and conflicting data that can used
  as a basis for discussion on improvements
  required for the underlying data.
• In the absence of a comprehensive data sets from
  household surveys, FBS represent the only source
  of standardized data that permit international
  comparisons over time.
• It can also be used to create supplementary
  indicators such as the Import Dependency Ratio
  (IDR) and Self-Sufficiency Ratio.

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• Food Balance Sheets Applications
• Import Dependency Ratio (IDR)
• An important aspect in assessing the food
  situation within a country including food
  security is the extent to which supply is
  dependent on external imports.
• The Import Dependency Ratio (IDR) measures
  precisely this the percentage of a countrys
  supply that is derived from imports, defined as
• IDR Imports / (Production Imports Exports)
  100
• Interpreting the IDR
• a value of 100 indicates 100 of the countrys
  supply for a given
• commodity is dependent on imports
• value of 40 indicates 40 of a countrys supply
  for a given commodity is dependent on imports.
  Or conversely, 60 of the countrys supply for
  the commodity is produced within the country

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• Food Balance Sheets Applications
• Import Dependency Ratio (IDR) (continued)
• The IDR can be calculated for individual
  commodities, groups of commodities of similar
  nutritional values, or even the aggregate of all
  commodities.
• However, the IDR is a simplified measure it
  does not take account of changes in stocks,
  neither does it take account of exports that are
  intended for re-export .

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• Food Balance Sheets Applications
• Self-Sufficiency Ratio (SSR)
• The Self-Sufficiency Ratio (SSR) expresses the
  magnitude of production in relation to domestic
  utilization, defined as
• SSR Production / (Production Imports
  Exports) 100
• Interpreting the SSR
• a value of 100 indicates 100 of the countrys
  supply originates from the countrys own
  production
• a value of 30 indicates 30 of the countrys
  supply originates from the countrys own
  production.
• In the context of food security, the SSR is often
  taken to indicate the extent to which a country
  relies on its own production. The higher the
  ratio, the greater the self-sufficiency.

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Thank you for your attention