Pacific Nutrient DataBase 2020

Household Income and Expenditure Surveys (HIES) are implemented to rebase consumer price indices and estimates of household contribution to national gross domestic product. More recently, HIES data have been used in poverty analyses and to conduct nutrition and food security oriented analyses.

The more recent applications of HIES data – poverty, nutrition and food security – require the use of edible-portion conversion factors to convert the reported acquisition of wholefoods into edible portions so estimates can be made of what people apparently ingest. These data then require the use of food composition tables (FCTs) to convert the edible portion into caloric and nutrient consumption values, so total energy and nutrient consumption can be estimated.

HIES data in the Pacific region are coded using the United Nations Statistics Division’s Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose (COICOP); however, there is no regionally standardised linkage between COICOP and the Pacific Islands Food Composition Tables Second Edition (PIFCT). Furthermore, the PIFCTs do not have edible-portion conversion factors and are insufficient to cover the full list of foods reported in the HIES.

To address this, the Pacific Nutrient Database (PNDB) was developed to provide the Pacific region with a standard set of conversion factors and food composition data that are mapped to COICOP (1999). To add more value to the database, each food item is also mapped to COICOP 2018, classified into FAO Commodity Groups and food groups to compute Household Dietary Diversity Scores (HDDS). The PNDB includes 26 components plus edible and inedible portions for a total of 822 foods.