The World Food Program is ramping up its Comprehensive Food Security Vulnerability Assessment. Some of these surveys have already taken place, many others are planned. This is a major effort to collect baseline household surveys in 16 countries in Africa.

Multiple surveys will be conducted over several years and the location of each household survey will be tagged with a GPS coordinate. When I attended the kick-off meeting recently in Rome I had the chance too take a complete look at the number of indicators the WFP is collecting and get feedback from several African countries where the surveys will be taking place.

In light of all the recent news around rising food prices and global food insecurity, this particular survey seems well timed. The granularity of the data at the sub-national level and the electronic means for getting data from the field far exceeds anything else I've seen.