Speaker
Description
Recent disruptions in global food supply chains have highlighted the issue of food self-sufficiency as an important part of the public debate. While many measures of food self-sufficiency exist, the literature highlights the problem with aggregating food self-sufficiency in individual food commodities to a country's overall food self-sufficiency. This paper presents an alternative measure of food self-sufficiency at the country level, the composite self-sufficiency ratio. It is based on the self-sufficiency ratio (SRR) concept, where SSRs are calculated for individual food items, and then aggregated using a geometric weighted average, where the weights represent the share of the respective categories for the analysed food items in the consumer basket. The proposed measure has been tested using examples from 42 countries, members of EU and OECD. The results have been shown to be intuitive and robust to spurious food self-sufficiency in countries with large export surpluses in single categories with significant deficits in others. The proposed measure can be useful not only for assessing a country's overall food self-sufficiency, but, thanks to the calculation method adopted, also highlights the issues of dietary diversity and financial availability of food. It therefore allows testing the robustness of a country's food security and should be taken into account when developing food security policies.
| Keywords | food self-sufficiency, food security, SSR, IDR, DEP |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
