How do Different Indicators of Household Food Security Compare?; Empirical Evidence from Tigray

With recent food crises at both regional and global levels, and renewed commitments from major donor countries to address chronic hunger, food security is more prominent on the policy agenda today than it has been in the past. This has intensified the search for accurate, rapid, and consistent indicators of food security. Different measures of the access dimension of food insecurity are used interchangeably, without a good idea of which food-security dimensions are captured by which measures, increasing the risk that the number of food-insecure individuals is underestimated. This paper draws on four rounds of data from a panel survey of 300 rural households in northern Ethiopia to compare seven different measures collected across all rounds: