Samoa’s food consumption patterns give crucial insights into welfare, food security and nutrition, say Pacific Community (SPC) and Samoa Bureau of Statistics experts following a World Bank-supported workshop last month.
SPC’s Statistics for Development Division has supported Samoa’s Bureau of Statistics with the principles behind food data processing and the use of food consumption distributions to analyse poverty, food security and consumption in a technical workshop held in Suva, Fiji in August.
Food data—collected through household income and expenditure surveys (HIES)—represents one of the major components in the measurement of poverty and is, therefore, an essential source of information in assessing welfare and a country’s state of development.
This approach to poverty assessment—the monetary poverty method—involves calculating the level of consumption required to meet an individual’s basic needs, both food as well as non-food goods and services. The amount spent to consume foods, the quantities, and the amount of dietary energy of each food item consumed are all inputs to the poverty estimate.
But Ms Maria Musudroka, Manager of Statistics Collections with SPC’s Statistics for Development Division, explains that until recently, processing food data has proved to be very challenging.
“The means to collect food consumption has been a 14-day diary,” she explains. “This collects a mix of both food acquisition and consumption which is very complex and involves a lot of resources to handle. This translated into long delays between the time the survey was conducted and dissemination of the results.”
Since 2018 and the release of guidelines from the World Bank and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations on food data collection, a standard module on food consumption data has been developed for the Pacific and included in most HIES conducted in the region since.
This survey harmonisation in the region represented a unique opportunity to develop standard methods and tools that can apply to all new surveys—to reduce the time spent on survey processing and making it easier to manage.
In recent years, SPC’s Statistics for Development Division has worked towards the creation of a set of standard routines for Stata statistical software to apply when processing food data collected in HIES conducted in the Pacific.
With a mandate to strengthen the capacities of national statistical systems to supply data, SPC’s Statistics for Development Division has been working closely with countries’ statistics bureaux to provide technical assistance on data collection, analysis and dissemination—like with this workshop, supported by the World Bank as part of the PACSTAT project.
The workshop also represented an opportunity to further discuss non-food data and to report on a ‘Food away from home’ experiment that was implemented concurrently with the HIES. This ‘innovative experiment’ is also funded under PACSTAT as part of a research programme to test alternative data collection methods, reflecting the uniquely Pacific context.
The objective of the experiment was twofold. Firstly, to test the assumption that the cost of a calorie consumed at home—and used to estimate the total amount of dietary energy consumed away from home from data collected in HIES—is the same as the cost of a calorie consumed away from home. Secondly, to propose an alternative and innovative way to collect food-away-from-home consumption.
The latter saw the creation of a new individual diary and visual aid in the form of an ‘atlas’ of pictured portions of common foods consumed away from home. The meals included in the food atlas were selected using a combination of innovative techniques—such as web-scraping and crowdsourcing—as well as traditional methods, such as focus-group discussions and in-the-field surveys on a sample of food vendors.
Following the data-processing workshop, it is hoped a factsheet on food consumption patterns in Samoa can be published in October. The ‘innovative experiment’ food atlas will also be shared, along with the main results of the food-away-from-home experiment, at the Pacific Statistics Methods Board on 7–8 October in Port Vila, Vanuatu.