Towards a New Food Security Index for Urban Household Food Security

The multidimensionality of food security can confound both statistical modelling and clear policy narratives. That complexity can become amplified in urban areas where food security is often a function of both local and global factors. Rather than focusing on one dimension of food security metrics, this investigation proposes a method for building an index of urban household food access, utilization and stability. The performance of this index is compared across three aggregation methods using household surveys collected from five cities around the world. The findings indicate that each aggregation method was internally consistent, although one of the aggregation methods, relying on geometric means, was likely to be more methodologically sound among the options. This method provides a means of capturing the multidimensional nature of food security in a way that is amenable to statistical modelling and clear policy narratives.