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. Where it sits says two different things about that country’s food system — and the two turn out to be almost unrelated, which is the whole reason for plotting them against each other.
Across — Jameel Index
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. Higher means more vulnerable. 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.
Up — HDBI
The Healthy Dietary Basket Index: how well a country’s food supply covers what a healthy diet actually requires. Higher means better fed. 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 −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. China, India, the United States, Brazil, Russia.
Well-supplied, but dependent on fragile imports. Mexico, Egypt, Iran, Türkiye, the United Kingdom, Italy.
Poorly supplied, but not import-dependent. Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, DR Congo.
Poorly supplied and dependent on fragile imports. Afghanistan, Yemen, Angola, Mozambique, Venezuela.
The one that surprises people
The top-right quadrant. The United Kingdom and Italy look comfortable on outcomes, yet they sit alongside Egypt and Iran on import fragility. They eat well because trade is working, not because they grow it. Neither measure shows that on its own — only their combination does.
Using it
Press play to run from 1980 to 2020 and watch countries move. 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.
Tap a dot for its details. Highlight a country to follow its trajectory as the years play.