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Preventing undernutrition: GIS analyzes food security

2012-01-26T19:14:00.002-05:00

Health food, a photo by redaleka on Flickr.

Largely due to a combination of higher computing power, and the broader availability and adoption of G1S technologies and data, policymakers now can more accurately and objectively formulate policies by leveraging traditional analytical approaches with innovative spatial techniques.

One of today's most pressing development challenges is food insecurity. More than 1 billion people globally don't have enough food to eat, and increasing food-price volatility and climate change may further exacerbate food insecurity.

Food insecurity often is higher in rural rather than urban areas. And people who are "food insecure" face poorer nutritional outcomes as well as potentially poorer health, lower education levels, more-limited market access and lower productivity as adults.

In addition to household-level factors, many determinants of food security are spatial in nature. Spatial modeling can help researchers analyze major determinants of food security by relating the location of the food insecure to their access to markets and crucial social services. Creating a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) also can help international and local analysts and researchers organize large amounts of data in a Food Security Atlas.

Food Insecurity in Yemen

Yemen is among the poorest countries in the world, with one of the fastest-growing populations (expected to double within the next two decades). As a net food importer that imports between 70 to 90 percent of its main cereals, Yemen was particularly impacted by the 2007/2008 global food crisis, which eroded much of its recent progress in poverty reduction.

In response to the deteriorating economic situation, the government of Yemen, in cooperation with a team of international and national experts, proactively pursued the development of a national strategy to address and mitigate the risks of food security and better position itself to respond to future shocks.

Researchers at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) supported the Food Security Committee of Yemen--composed of various ministries, civil society and the private sector--in analytical efforts to develop the National Food Security Strategy (NFSS) for Yemen.

A three-pronged approach was implemented to better understand the dynamics of Yemen's food security:

1. Spatial modeling/exploratory spatial data analysis

2. Parametric regression models

3. Economy-wide modeling

Findings of the NFSS show that 32 percent of the population is food insecure, and 58 percent of children are malnourished, making Yemen one of the 10 most food-insecure countries in the world (see Figure 1). As part of the analysis to define options for improving Yemen's food security, IFPRI researchers used advanced spatial techniques such as deterministic spatial models, spatial statistics and spatial econometric methods to identify key geographic economic determinants--most notably market access and access to health services--that help explain the spatial heterogeneity of food security and child undernutrition at the district level.

Access to Markets

Market access--important for producers and consumers--is a key influential indicator of food security, and it's captured most commonly by the distance or time traveled to the nearest market or place of trade. IFPRI researchers attempted to measure more-accurate travel times (e.g., using topographic land characteristics as a modifying factor), adjusting for different types of roads, steepness of terrain and mode of transport.

To relate food-insecure households to their accessibility to local markets, researchers used the concept of urban/rural linkages, which takes into account the spatial symbiosis between urban and rural in social, economic and financial aspects. In the absence of data on market locations, local markets were identified geographically within each district using Local Moran's statistics (a way to assess the significance of local spatial patterns) to find villages with a large population.

By employing a shortest-cost-path algorithm, the spatial analysis shows that access to local markets and urban centers is more limited for food-insecure than for food-secure households in Yemen. Regional differences also can be seen.

Market access was most limited in the country's eastern Desert Zone, where an average trip to a local market or urban center takes more than eight hours. The practical policy applications of this indicator and analysis helped the Food Security Committee formulate priorities in the NFSS related to infrastructure investments and market integration.

Access to Health Services

Access to quality health services has been established as an effective way to reduce under-nutrition in many countries. In Yemen, chronic child undernutrition has remained a key development challenge, with almost six out of every 10 children stunted (i.e., too short for their age).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

To test how food security and under-nutrition relate to health services, researchers used georeferenced data and a "distance-decay" approach, which measures the relationship between observed interaction patterns and distance when all other determinants of interaction are constant. To do this, researchers modeled Yemenis' physical access to health-service provision in rural and urban areas by measuring the accessibility between population location (cluster of villages) and service facilities.

Using high-resolution maps of georeferenced infrastructure (road networks, and urban and rural health facilities), topography (digital elevation models) and populated village locations, researchers were able to use travel time as a proxy for distance to more-accurately reflect the accessibility of health centers and hospitals to specific clusters of villages. An index for physical accessibility to healthcare-service provision then was computed by deriving the exponential distance-decay function related to household income and population.

Creating an SDI

IFPRI researchers used GIS technology to create a food-security Geodatabase model in Yemen that was ultimately used to create a Food Security Atlas. The specific aim of this holistic Geodatabase model was to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of information management and improve the decision-making abilities of governmental institutions in Yemen.

Figure 3 shows the conceptual data model that incorporates relevant variables to food security from the main sectors of Yemen's economy. The food-security data model has five key components:

1. Physical and human geography

2. Food security and nutrition

3. Trade and infrastructure

4. Agriculture and water

5. Health

The food-security data model design was established in compliance with the ISO 19110 international standard for geographic information methodology for feature cataloging. Using Esri Geodatabase modeling techniques, IFPRI implemented the feature-cataloging concepts based on the fundamental principle of abstraction.

Figure 4 summarizes the standard procedures and steps for designing and building the food-security geodatabase model. It includes the conceptual model composed of four basic activities:

1. Conceptual framework and guidelines

2. User needs assessment

3. Checking existing data models

4. Data inventory

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

A Future Outlook

GIS significantly contributed to Yemen's national food-security strategy. Through spatial analysis, researchers identified spatial determinants of food security and measured access to markets and quality health services--key influential indicators of food security.

Such analysis also promoted the use of international standards for spatial data infrastructures, laying the foundation for the creation, exchange and use of geospatial data among Yemeni national agencies. Yemeni analysts have been trained in the use of the Food Security Atlas, and several institutions have adopted the underlying data model to add and organize their own data.

Furthermore, the food-security spatial data model serves as a basis for further spatial data development to deveiop core maps, build sustainable mechanisms for sharing and maintaining the quality of geographic information, and promote the efficient use of geographic information for better decision making.

Some avenues for future exploration include incorporating precise household location and spatial structures, such as social networks driven by economic incentives, in the framework of spatial dependence. Continued cooperation and investment in the construction and collection of national databases will significantly enhance the capability and analytical power of researchers to address pressing issues in food security.

Source Citation
Breisinger, Clemens, Olivier Ecker, and Jose Funes. "Preventing undernutrition: GIS analyzes food security in Yemen." GEO World July 2011: 26+. Gale Power Search. Web. 26 Jan. 2012.
Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA262886743&v=2.1&u=22054_acld&it=r&p=GPS&sw=w

Gale Document Number: GALE|A262886743

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