What this document is
The Food Insecurity Experience Scale, known as FIES, is a survey-based tool the Food and Agriculture Organization introduced in 2014 through its Voices of the Hungry project, funded with support from the UK Department for International Development and the Kingdom of Belgium. Rather than inferring food insecurity from income or calorie data, FIES asks people eight standardized questions about their own experience, among them whether they worried about having enough to eat or had to skip meals over a fixed reference period.
The scale draws on roughly two decades of earlier experience-based food security measurement work carried out at the national level in various countries, and FAO built FIES specifically to make results comparable across countries rather than only within one. That comparability underpins its use as the basis for monitoring Sustainable Development Goal indicator 2.1.2, and FAO has since worked with national statistical offices to build local capacity to run the survey themselves.
FAO maintains current FIES documentation, survey modules and country-level adoption data through its "measuring hunger" pages rather than as a single static report.
Where to find it
Available from FAO.