The Hunger Atlas
987,000 records from five sources, asking one question: if a country grows enough food, why are its children still starving?
? What do these terms and units mean? tap to open
Units you'll see
- pp percentage points
- The plain gap between two percentages. Going from 10% to 15% is a rise of 5 pp — not 5%, and not 50%. Used whenever two percentages are subtracted.
- %
- Share out of every 100 people. "18.7% of children are wasted" means roughly 19 in every 100.
- M
- Million people. 22.2M = 22,200,000.
- kcal/day
- Kilocalories per person per day — everyday "calories". A typical adult needs about 2,300.
- PPP $
- Dollars adjusted for local cost of living, so $1 buys the same amount everywhere. Makes rich and poor countries fairly comparable.
- per 1,000 · per 100k
- A rate per that many people, used when raw counts would be tiny. "26 per 1,000" means 26 out of every thousand.
What's being measured
- Wasting
- A child who is too thin for their height. Recent and acute — it means the child is in danger now.
- Stunting
- A child who is too short for their age. Slow damage built up over years, and largely permanent after age two.
- Anaemia
- Too little haemoglobin in the blood — usually iron deficiency. Causes exhaustion, and in pregnancy it produces small babies.
- Low birthweight
- A baby born under 2.5 kg. Starts life already behind.
- Undernourishment
- Not getting enough calories to meet daily energy needs. Note this counts calories only — a person can eat enough and still be badly nourished.
- Calorie surplus
- Food supply minus what the population actually needs. Above zero means the country has more food than it requires.
Statistics terms
- r correlation
- How tightly two things move together, from −1 to +1. 0 means no relationship at all; +0.8 means they rise together closely. Our food-production figure is −0.03 — essentially nothing.
- p p-value
- The chance a result is a coincidence. p<0.05 means under a 1-in-20 chance of being a fluke, so it's treated as real. ns = not significant, meaning it could easily be chance.
- Predicted vs actual
- We estimate what a country's wasting should be given its income, sanitation and birthweight. The gap between that and reality is the unexplained part — the interesting bit.
- World median
- The middle country when all are ranked, so half sit above and half below. More honest than an average, which a few extreme countries can drag around.
- Rebased to 100
- Used on the price charts. Each commodity is compared to its own yearly average, so a market in Bihar and one in Kerala can be read on the same scale. +28% means 28% dearer than that item's normal price.
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