Finally, we find that—also contrary to normal patterns in consumption data—food consumption as a share of total household expenditures is very low in the South, despite being the region with the highest official poverty rate. Even more surprisingly, it seems that Engel’s law<sup>6</sup> does not hold in rural areas, where the expected negative correlation between food consumption shares and expenditure levels is hardly detectable.

When looking at the causes of consumption underreporting, three elements emerge. The first is the preprinted food-item list used in the consumption questionnaires. The 2008/09 survey included a list of 38 food items, 18 for purchased food and 20 for consumption of household produce. This list seems to be too restrictive to adequately capture dietary diversity and consumption patterns across provinces. In addition, the enumerators’ apparent tendency to underreport food transactions (including food purchases, the bartering of household produce, or food received in exchange for work) could have been facilitated by an overly restrictive questionnaire, which may not have left enough room to record all food-related transactions and which did not provide extra room for reporting additional food items not included in the printed list. Also, the fact that the pre-typed list included only primary agricultural commodities, but not prepared or packaged food, could have prevented the comprehensive reporting of food consumed in urban areas, where households devote a larger share of consumption to packaged food. The 2002/03 survey was also affected by similar problems, and this appears to have biased earlier poverty figures, particularly for Southern Mozambique.

The second issue is poor management of data-collection activities. Food consumption data in the IAF<sup>7</sup> 2002/03 and IOF 2008/09 were collected in a different manner than initially planned. Food transactions should have been reported by the households themselves through the use of a diary, in which every two days they would record the daily food transactions that had occurred; and three enumerator visits to each household were initially envisaged. However, this procedure was not implemented. Instead, only one visit was completed in 93 percent of cases in the IOF 2008/09. It should not come as a surprise that many households showing low calorie consumption also reported fewer than ten transactions during the recall period (7 days); this is likely the result of limited supervision during the survey fieldwork.

Finally, the lack of official conversion factors for non-standard measurement units could have significantly affected calorie calculations. Two main assumptions are used in computing calorie consumption in the 2008/09 survey, namely (i) that one piece/unit of bread is set to weigh 200 grams in every province, although it is uncertain whether this is in fact true across the entire country, and (ii) that one coconut is assumed to contain 800 grams of edible parts, regardless of its actual size, ripeness or freshness.

Problems related to caloric intake, and the considerable disparities between wellbeing indicators and poverty figures, also appear to affect the 2002/03 data. These flaws in data collection and analysis

> 6 “Engel’s law” refers to the typical observation that as income rises, the share of food consumption in total expenditures falls, or, in other words, that food is a normal good, with an income elasticity of demand between 0 and 1.

> 7 _Inquérito aos Agregados Familiares sobre Orçamento Familiar_ : “Household Survey of Family Budgets”, the precursor to the IOF.

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