On distinguishing food insecurity levels with the Latin American and Caribbean Food Security Scale

The Latin American and Caribbean Food Security Scale (ELCSA) is widely used in the region to classify population groups with presumably distinctive levels (mild, moderate or severe) of food (in)security. This paper puts under scrutiny the validity and utility of the resulting population groups using data from the Mexican National Survey of Household Income and Expenditure 2018. The analyses use scalogram analysis, Item Response Theory and Latent Class Analysis to look at the properties of the groups derived from the ELCSA. The paper shows that ELCSA’s capacity to actually distinguish between four levels of food insecurity is rather weak. The analyses suggest the ELCSA reliably captures severe food insecurity scores but not milder forms of food deprivation. A key objective of the ELCSA is to identify different ranges/groups of food insecurity, and the main implication of our findings is that it is time for a thorough makeover of the scale.