The Food Balance Sheets were compiled with the technical and financial support from AfDB, under its Statistics Department in collaboration with the Madagascar Country Office, with support from Phase 5 of the Statistical Capacity Building Program (SCB-5) of the Bank executed by COMESA. The SCB-5 benefitted from the ADF 15 Regional Public Goods window..

Food Balance Sheets statistics are critical for assessing a country’s food security situation and, more broadly, for assessing the general strength of a country’s entire food and agriculture sector. One of the major outputs of FBS statistics is the estimation of Dietary Energy Supply (DES), which is an essential indicator for analyzing the food security situation in a country, and can be used to estimate the proportion of a country’s population that is undernourished. This food security indicator is one of the SDGs used to monitor a country’s food security situation. Data from FBS can also be used to generate other nutritional indicators (such as the quantities of fats, proteins, vitamins and minerals available per person per day), used to assess the quality of nutrition in a country. Another useful indicator generated from the FBS data is the Food Loss Index/Percentage which is another important SDG that countries are expected to report on. FBS statistics are also used for measuring a country’s self-sufficiency in food production and its dependency on food imports; these metrics, produced by commodity or at the aggregate level, constitute very useful pieces of information for decision-makers in the agricultural sector to assess food supply gaps, as well as to better orient public and private investments in agriculture.