Cash for work Final NRVA 2005 Report

Afghanistan NRVA 2005 67 Figure 18: Population consuming a diet with low food diversity The highest percentages of households with low dietary diversity and very poor food consumption are found in the central part of the country and Nuristan province in the east. These areas have bad roads and difficult access to markets throughout the year. The northern parts of the country present higher dietary diversity related to higher and more diversified local production. The minimum caloric intake of 2.067 kcal per person per day was adjusted by age and gender to produce another perspective of food insecurity. Figure 19: Population consuming less than minimum calorie requirements adjusted by age and gender Afghanistan NRVA 2005 68 The first Millennium Development Goal, Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, aims to halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger. NRVA 2005 data indicates that 30 of households eat, on average, below their daily requirement; the households in the urban areas 31 are slightly more food insecure than both the rural and Kuchi population. Table 66: Population below minimum level of dietary energy consumption adjusted by age and gender NRVA 2005 Kuchi Rural Urban National Percentage 24 30 31 30 The population estimated to be below the daily intake requirement adjusted by age and gender is likely to lose weight; furthermore, if this condition prevails among children, their physical and mental development is at risk. However, caloric requirement is likely to underestimate nutritional requirements. When diversity of diet very poor dietary diversity plus poor dietary diversity and poor food consumption is included in the analysis, 61 of the households are likely to be below the nutritional threshold; however, this requires further verification. This finding can be related with households’ perceptions that 44 are food insecure section 4. Nutrition and poverty are related, but it is a complex relationship. Caloric intake and dietary diversity are not strongly correlated Johnacheck and Holland, 2005, and the correlation between low caloric intake and ownership of land, cattle and poultry has been found World Bank, 2005a. The caloric intake threshold is not equivalent to a poverty line because a poverty line includes the non-food expenditure component such as housing, clothing, transportation, and other essential needs. Sufficiency of energy intake is most highly correlated with the food poverty, which uses expense to ensure on food items only. Further attempts to estimate expenditure-based food and overall poverty headcount rates should be made. Further work is needed to analyse the rural-urban and Kuchi-urban gap using both quantity of intake and quality of diet. There may be some gender differences that explain the pattern of increasing number of women above 24 years dying more frequently than men of the same age group see figure 2. This is likely to be a cumulative effect of several factors that determine lower women’s survivability, of which, nutrition and health care are explanatory variables; this nexus needs to be investigated.