A call for national monitoring of food poverty in the UK

A gathering of campaigners and academics at City University in January agreed on the need for a standard, quantitative measure of food insecurity in the UK.

The meeting, organised by Sustain with Oxfam, The Food Foundation and the Sociology Department at Oxford University, heard presentations on the history of efforts to measure hunger and food poverty, on the pros and cons of national measuring, on the experience of the devolved UK governments (all of which have made efforts to collect quantitative data on food poverty), and on models of measurement which have been successfully used by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN and the Canadian government, respectively. A summary of the day's proceedings is available from the Food Research Collaboration.