On January 30, 2008, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) held a seminar, organized jointly with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

This seminar is a continuing theme in the events initiated by FAO and it succeeds the alimentary security and consume statistics workshop based on “Household Budget Survey” (CBGC), which took place on 18-22 September 2006.

The seminar was attended by representatives of the UN FAO, Mr. Ricardo Sibrian, the NBS representatives, as well as representatives of ministries and other institutions.

The seminar discussed the methodological aspects of food security statistics in the Republic of Moldova, CE-FAO Programme for Food Security. The main objective of the programme is to intensify the analytical dividing capacity of the food security statistics based on CBGC data, required to implement the Millennium Development Goals. This work is supported by experimental calculations, based on data obtained from CBGC in 2003 and 2006 in the Republic of Moldova. The importance of producing statistics at the national and local levels is to assure the definition of vulnerable groups in terms of food, as well as to assess the effects of food security politics in dynamics by comparing food security figures obtained on the basis of CBGC data from 2003 and 2006.

NBS has developed a functional methodology for gathering information on household expenditure on food by interviewed 6000 households in the CBGC survey. Data on food are collected on the basis of diaries on a monthly period.

In order to improve informational frame of monitoring the situation and progress in the field of food security, NBS has begun work on compiling the statistic indicators describing the food security, based on the UN FAO methodology.

Food security of the population is one of the basic goals of many development programmes, both on the national and international levels, such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and the World Summit on Food Industry (WSFI), aimed to reduce by half the number of hungry people by 2015.