“Measuring hunger”: psychometric scales of food insecurity and indigenous peoples in Brazil

The Brazilian Food Insecurity Scale (EBIA) was validated for the Brazilian context in 2004. Since then, the scale has evaluated and measured the experience of food insecurity in rural and urban households, initially in the Brazilian National Household Sample Survey and later in the Brazilian National Survey of Demographic and Health. However, indigenous peoples have not been examined specifically in these surveys, despite recognition of their food and nutritional vulnerability. In this scenario, we analyze and discuss the application of the EBIA among indigenous peoples in Brazil, based on a set of fundamental questions for understanding and measuring their experience with food insecurity and “hunger”. We conduct a sociopolitical and ethnographic analysis of a set of official documents and significant articles on the use of psychometric scales of food insecurity among Brazilian indigenous peoples, compared to international studies on the validation and application of scales in other sociocultural contexts. The initiatives with adaptation and application of the EBIA to indigenous peoples in Brazil indicate that understanding and measuring food insecurity in these peoples poses a major challenge. Particularly complex is the proposal to guarantee comparability of different contexts while taking into account the multiple local singularities. We propose that ethnographic studies should serve as specific components of future initiatives on this topic and that they should cover aspects such as the seasonality of indigenous peoples’ food production, different processes of food monetization, and the dynamics of their food systems.