Ireland tops Global Food Security Index

Ireland saw its place as number one in the Economist’s Global Food Security Index (GFSI) for 2021 secured due to several issues, the website says. Over ten years, Ireland has been able to keep food costs down at the same time as tackling inequality and ensuring that a safety net remains in place. It has seen a big jump in agricultural R&D and has been able to minimise food loss, helping to ensure that enough quality food is available. The government also has high nutritional standards and is politically committed to adaptation.

Following in the top five is Austria, the UK, Finland and Switzerland. The ten-year anniversary of the index has shown how important it is to look at hunger from a food-systems approach. This involves weighing up the affordability, availability, quality and safety of food, as well as assessing how resilient nations are in protecting their natural resources to enable them to keep producing food now and in the future.

Over the past ten years, new sub-measures have been added to the GFSI, reflecting the growing importance of markets, financial products, technology and innovation in enabling food security. At the same time, structural factors cannot be ignored, so the index weighs gender and income inequality, along with political and social risks posed by corruption and conflict. The existential threat of climate change is now also a major consideration. All of these measures reflect broader trends that have reshaped food security over the decade.

In assessing the specific drivers of food insecurity over ten years, the report presents the following key findings:

  • After making rapid gains in the first few years of its inception, the GFSI scores across all nations peaked in 2019, before dropping over the past two years amid the Covid-19 pandemic, conflict and climate variability.
  • This drop in GFSI scores has been seen across all regions and nations in all the different income tiers. However, high-income nations in Europe still lead the index, as they did a decade ago, taking up seven of the top ten places, with Ireland getting top spot, scoring 84 (all GFSI scores are marked out of 100).
  • Similarly, Sub-Saharan African nations continue to dominate the bottom ten spots on the index, taking up seven of these places, with bottom-scorer Burundi’s score of 34.67 only 43% that of Ireland.
  • The GFSI shows that hunger (using undernourishment as a measure) and stunting in children are most tied to the quality and safety of food. Populations with diets that lack quality protein and micronutrients, and where access to drinking water is limited, score worse in food security.
  • Affordability is also closely linked to hunger. The GFSI shows that countries without comprehensive, well-funded national food safety-net programmes have higher levels of hunger (and stunting in children). Funding for these nets is the measure that has dropped the most over the decade, followed by a greater dependency on food aid.
  • Greater volatility in food prices since 2019 have affected how affordable food is. Seventy countries slip in this year’s GFSI rankings because of rising costs. Indeed, among the four pillars that make up the GFSI, affordability has fallen the most over the decade.
  • Natural resources and resilience is the lowest scoring pillar among the four categories of food security, dragging down the GFSI score overall. The countries in the index score only 50.8 out of 100 for this pillar, compared with a GFSI score of 60 across the board. While this is an improvement from 2012, it is only a slight rise from 50.1 in 2019, at a time when climate risks are taking centre-stage.
  • Conversely, the highest scoring pillar is for quality and safety of food. The average score across all nations is 68, driven by the widespread adoption of nutritional plans or strategies. This is key because diet-related diseases are the primary cause of premature death globally.
  • Finally, the availability of food is ranked third after food quality and safety, and affordability, with a score of 56.7. This is a jump from 53.4 in 2012; however, most of this rise came before 2019. While the overall availability score is buoyed by a 41.5-point jump in crop storage facilities for all countries, it is dragged down by a drop in public expenditure on agricultural research and development (R&D).
  • The countries that are models for food security are those that score highly on all four pillars of food security. For example, top-scorer Ireland scores above 92 points for affordability, and quality and safety of food, and above 74 points for the availability and resilience pillars.
  • These trends have been replayed to some extent across the top ten most improved nations over a decade, which include countries like Tanzania, Oman and China, who have moved up because they have been able to tackle affordability, instil safety nets and boost market access. They have also cut back on volatility in production and committed to food security strategies and adaptation policies.
  • Conversely, those nations that have deteriorated the most, like Venezuela and Burundi, have done so because they have been unable to keep food costs down, have not had sufficient food supply or market access, and have suffered from volatile production. The bottom ten nations have often not had the capacity to grow food security through investing in R&D, safety nets, food security strategies, national adaptation policies, risk management plans and nutritional guidelines. These policies, investments and regulations are essential to the construction of food-secure economies.

For more information about the Global Food Security Index 2021, click here.

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