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МОНГОЛЫН ХҮН АМЫН СЭТГҮҮЛ Дугаар (367) 20, 2011
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I then analyze how calories taken from each food changed by poverty status (Figure 4).
Figure 4:
Proportion of calories from food groups by poverty status
I plot the percentage of calories coming from
different food groups at each poor and non
poor level. For the national flour, rice, dairy,
meat and oil products are main sources for
calorie. Two clear findings arise: non poor
households tend to substitute flour and rice
with dairy, sugar and other foods; there is no
any remarkable difference in consumption on
those fruit and vegetables which can provide
more essential nutrient across the groups.
CONCLUSION
The analysis of food security, poverty and
nutrition provides essential insights for
creating appropriate and effective policies and
programs to address these issues. Using the
HSES 2007/08 data, this paper has analyzed
the relationship between nutrient consumption
and poverty in Mongolia. Poverty plays an
important role in the household nutrient
consumption, according to quantitative results
of this study.
The food security indicators such as nutrient
intake and adequacy ratio are examined
by poverty status. The mean intake for
nutrients can provide general pattern about
a household’s ability to spend on food. The
findings show that the difference between
nutrient consumption between the poor and for
the non-poor was quite large and statistically
significant. The adequacy ratio, another food
security indicator, reveals that poor households
are below the benchmark level of all nutrients
except animal fat. And it can imply that
deficiencies in nutrients are a problematic
issue only for poor households while all the
population is facing a problem with excess of
appropriate intake for animal fat.
One contribution of this study is to estimate
an indicator of the goal 1 of the MDG that
has been not estimated in Mongolia yet. The
proportion of population below minimum level
of dietary energy consumption in Mongolia
is 25.1 per cent, which means that around
660.0 thousand individuals are considered
undernourished.
Although the food security indicators which
are used in this study are easy to understand,
it does not provide information on the