16.C. Skills building seminar: FAO/WHO GIFT: a global repository for harmonized individual quantitative food consumption data
Authors:   Organised by: FAO/WHO GIFT,   Chair persons: Agnieszka Balcerzak - Italy
Published: October 2020

Understanding the various eating habits of different population groups, according to the geographical area, is critical to develop evidence-based policies for nutrition and food safety. However, there is a lack of data on what people eat, which makes it difficult for policy makers to develop and implement policies that can shape food systems to enable sustainable and healthy diets.

The FAO/WHO Global Individual Food consumption data Tool (FAO/WHO GIFT, www.fao.org/gift-individual-food-consumption) is a novel open-access online platform hosted by FAO and supported by WHO. FAO/WHO GIFT is aimed at increasing the quality, availability and use of individual quantitative food consumption (IQFC) data in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) to enable evidence-based decision-making and policy development for better nutrition and food safety. The platform is developed in synergy with other global initiatives working with food consumption data (e.g. Intake, Global Dietary Database, FAO/WHO FOSCOLLAB).

FAO/WHO GIFT collates, harmonizes and disseminates IQFC data collected in different countries. The harmonization is aimed at enhancing the consistency and reliability of nutrient intake and dietary exposure assessments globally. All datasets are harmonized with the European Food Safety Authority's food classification and description system FoodEx2. The data are disseminated as ready-to-use food-based indicators in the form of infographics, and as microdata. The infographics intend to facilitate the use of these data by policy makers, providing an overview of key data according to population segments and food groups. The microdata is publicly available for download, and is intended for expert users that would like to do further analysis of the data.

The main objective of the workshop is to provide participants with the opportunity to understand how to use the FAO/WHO GIFT platform for their work. Participants will learn how to identify existing IQFC surveys worldwide, to compute ready-to-use indicators on food consumption, food safety and nutrition and how to download dietary microdata. In addition, the workshop will provide an overview of the potential uses of the FAO/WHO GIFT platform for developing or improving diet-related policies.

The workshop will be structured in three parts. First, the FAO/WHO GIFT platform and its different features will be briefly demonstrated by the panelists. In the second part, participants will be introduced to the FoodEx2 system. In the third part, participants will be divided in small groups to do hands-on exercises using the features of the platform and provide suggestions on how the platform could be improved to better support their work.

The target audience are policy makers, researchers and students that work or are interested in the area of dietary assessment, food consumption surveys, nutrition, dietary exposure assessment, agriculture and/or food safety.

Key messages

FAO/WHO GIFT increases the quality, availability and use of dietary data from low- and middle-income countries. FAO/WHO GIFT can be used to inform evidence-based policy development for better nutrition and food safety.