Food Security: A Comparison of Indicators for the United States and the United Republic of Tanzania

Carlisle Pemberton^1, , Mary Mgonja², Afiya De Sormeaux³, Hazel Patterson-Andrews⁴ and Esther Mwaisango⁵

¹Department of Agricultural Economics and Extension, University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago (Retired)

²Country Head – Tanzania, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)

³MPhil Student, SALISES, University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago

⁴Department of Agricultural Economics and Extension, University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago

⁵Senior Agricultural Officer, Ministry of Agriculture Food Security and Cooperatives (MAFC), Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Cite this paper

Carlisle Pemberton, Mary Mgonja, Afiya De Sormeaux, Hazel Patterson-Andrews and Esther Mwaisango. Food Security: A Comparison of Indicators for the United States and the United Republic of Tanzania. Journal of Food Security. 2016; 4(4):95-103. doi: 10.12691/JFS-4-4-3

Abstract

Developing nations have struggled with the problem of food insecurity thus one of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG) was to ‘eradicate extreme poverty and hunger’ with a target of halving between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger. Progress has been made by developing countries in increasing their food security, however a question remains about their status as compared to developed countries; thus this paper sought to devise a methodology to compare the food security status of a food surplus developing country to a food surplus developed country utilizing the four pillars of food security; availability, access, utilization and stability. To test the methodology a comparison was made between the United Republic of Tanzania, a bright spot in the developing world and the United States utilizing indicators for the four pillars from the FAOSTAT Food Security data domain. The results suggest that Tanzania is still deficient with respect to most food security indicators, including the key indicator - the “prevalence of undernourishment”. Tanzania’s food security status also compares unfavorably to that of the United States, which remains among the leading nations in maintaining a high level of national food security. Finally the paper explores the critical areas needed for the improvement of the food security status of Tanzania.

Keywords

food security, Tanzania, United States, food security indicators, application of MANOVA

Copyright

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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