Food Consumption Score
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.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- 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. · URL
- Wiesmann, D., Bassett, L., Benson, T., & Hoddinott, J. (2009). Validation of the World Food Programme's Food Consumption Score and Alternative Indicators of Household Food Security. IFPRI Discussion Paper 870. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. · URL
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