Compare methods

	Food Balance Sheet Analysis	Food Consumption Score
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2001	2008
Originator	Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)	World Food Programme, Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping (VAM)
Type	National commodity supply-utilization accounting for food availability	Weighted food-group frequency index of household food consumption
Seminal source	FAO (2001). Food Balance Sheets: A Handbook. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.	World Food Programme (2008). Food Consumption Analysis: Calculation and Use of the Food Consumption Score in Food Security Analysis. Rome: WFP Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping (VAM) Technical Guidance Sheet.
Aliases	FBS, FAO Food Balance Sheets, National Food Supply Accounting, Dietary Energy Supply Analysis	FCS, WFP Food Consumption Score, Weighted Food Group Frequency Score
Related	3	3
Summary	Food Balance Sheet (FBS) analysis is FAO's framework for accounting for a country's food supply, codified in the 2001 handbook Food Balance Sheets: A Handbook and updated in FAO's 2017 methodology. For each commodity, the FBS balances the total supply available during a reference period — domestic production plus imports adjusted for stock changes — against all utilization: exports, animal feed, seed, processing, waste, other non-food uses, and finally the quantity available for human consumption. Dividing food available by population gives per capita supply, which is then converted, using food-composition factors, into Dietary Energy Supply (kilocalories per person per day) and protein and fat supply. The FBS underpins national-level food-security indicators, including the prevalence of undernourishment.	The Food Consumption Score (FCS) is the World Food Programme's standard household food-security indicator, defined in its 2008 VAM technical guidance. It is a weighted measure of dietary diversity and frequency: enumerators record how many days in the past week a household consumed each of a set of standard food groups, those frequencies are capped at seven and multiplied by weights reflecting each group's nutritional importance, and the weighted sum yields a score from zero to 112. Households are then classified as having poor, borderline, or acceptable food consumption using standard thresholds. Validated against caloric and other food-security measures by Wiesmann and colleagues at IFPRI, the FCS is widely used in emergency and development food-security assessments because it is fast, cheap, and proxies both diet quality and adequacy.