Analysis
Food trade vulnerability against diet quality, country by country, 1980–2020. Press play to watch them move.
Display options
Select at least one country to see trajectories through time.
Continents
How to read
Every dot is a country. Across the X-axis shows the Jameel Index – a country's food import vulnerability – and up the Y-axis shows the Healthy Dietary Basket Index (HDBI) – how well a country’s food supply covers what a healthy diet requires.
X-AXIS – Across — Jameel Index
The Jameel Index is demonstrates how exposed a country is to a disruption in the food it imports, scored from 0 to 1 and banded from Very Low to Extreme. The higher the score, the more vulnerable the country (i.e. how far right on the graph). For example, countries that grow most of what they eat sit on the left – France, the United States, Argentina, Australia. Countries that bring nearly all of it in through a handful of trade corridors sit on the right – Djibouti, the Maldives, Hong Kong, Cabo Verde.
Y-AXIS – Up — HDBI
The Healthy Dietary Basket Index (HDBI) demonostrates how well a country’s food supply covers what a healthy diet actually requires. Higher means better fed (i.e. how far up on the graph). It is an outcome – what people can eat today – where the horizontal axis is a risk, meaning how safe that outcome is.
The two do not track each other
Across the whole dataset the correlation between them is about minus 0.03 – essentially none. Knowing how well a country eats tells you almost nothing about how fragile its supply is, and the reverse. That is why the chart is a matrix rather than a line: each country falls into one of four distinct situations, and the crosshairs split it at the median of each measure rather than at the middle of the scale.
Well-supplied and feeds itself.
Well-supplied, but dependent on fragile imports.
Poorly supplied, but not import-dependent.
Poorly supplied and dependent on fragile imports.
Using it
Press play to run from 1980 to 2020 and watch countries move. Use the speed controls to speed up or slow down the animation. Dot size is population, so a small dot crossing a line is a very different story from a large one. Pick countries from the search to give them a colour and a label, and turn on trajectory to draw the path each has taken. Explore the controls by click on 'keyboard shortcuts' to gain a more interactive experience.
Tap a dot for its details. Highlight a country to follow its trajectory as the years play.