New Global Food Security Index: But where is Crop Diversity?

A new measure of the sustainability of food production is out, thanks to The Economist Intelligence Unit and the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition. It considers agricultural sustainability, food loss and waste and nutritional challenges at a country level.

Only two of the more than 60 indicators which go into making up the index consider crop diversity: “agricultural diversification” (the top 3 crops as a percentage of agricultural production) and “environmental biodiversity.” This last turns out to be nothing more than “Proportion of local breeds classified as being at risk of extinction'” which of course is SDG Indicator 2.5.2. So what happened to 2.5.1?

Finding good indicators for crop diversity has of course always been challenging. The recently launched Agrobiodiversity index is looking at this question more comprehensively and perhaps a future version of the Food sustainability index could build on this.