Increasing the Resilience of the Food Systems
In Islamic States in Face of Future Food Crises
27
note, as the table below shows, that affordability and quality and safety scores of all lowest
performing countries are consistently lower than their availability scores .70
Table 6: Global Food Security Index - Lowest Performing Countries
Global Ranking Country Overall score Affordability Availability Quality & Safety
=104 Niger 33.7 22.5 45.1 30.2
=104 Zambia 33.7 19.9 48.7 27.0
106 Haiti 33.0 28.0 39.6 27.5
107 Malawi 32.4 18.0 44.7 34.8
108 Chad 31.5 22.3 38.6 35.2
109 Sierra Leone 29.2 21.8 35.9 29.0
110 Yemen 28.5 29.0 31.0 20.3
111 Madagascar 27.0 12.4 42.0 22.5
112 Congo (Dem. Rep.) 26.1 14.3 36.1 28.3
113 Burundi 23.9 14.7 30.0 30.6
Source: The Global Food Security Index
2.2. Food Insecurity Drivers – Global Overview
Various food insecurity drivers—whether economic, political, social or environmental—contribute
to varying degrees to the rise of global this section,the naturalresources and resilience
scores of the Global Food Security index are used to provide a global overview of vulnerability to
food insecurity drivers. The natural resources and resilience category includes six components:
exposure, water,land, oceans, adaptivecapacity, anddemographic stress.The exposure component
relates toenvironmental drivers, which covers temperature rise,drought,flooding, stormseverity,
sea level rise, and commitment to managing exposure. The water, land and oceans components
relate to economic insecurity drivers, which covers the availability/scarcity of natural resources
needed for food security—which includes agricultural water quantity and quality, soil erosion,
grassland, forest change, eutrophication and hypoxia, marine biodiversity, and marine protected
areas. The sensitivity component relates to both economic and political insecurity drivers, which
cover food import dependency, dependence on natural capital,and disasterriskmanagement. The
adaptive capacity componentrelates topolitical drivers, which cover earlywarningmeasures and
a national agricultural risk management system. The demographic stresses component relates to
social insecurity drivers, which covers urbanization and population growth.
In the following graph,scores from thenatural resources and resilience category of the GlobalFood
Security index illustrate regionaldifferences in vulnerability to food insecurity drivers. Europehas
the best performance on exposure,land,demographic stresses and adaptive capacity. Sub-Saharan
Africa has the bestperformance on land,water,andoceans, dueto thecomparatively non-industrial
nature of its agriculture and infrastructure.NorthAmerica has the best performance on sensitivity,
whichwhere all regions aremost vulnerable due to food import dependency. TheMiddle Eastand
North Africa—especially the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries—are highly dependenton
imports for their food supplies. However, as only a small proportion of GCC populations live
below the poverty line, they are more financially resilient when global prices spike than Sub-
Saharan African countries, which are also highly dependent on imports but have also high
percentage of their populations below the poverty line.71
70 The Economist Intelligence Unit. (2018). Global Food Security Index 2018: Building Resilience in the Face of Rising Food-
Security Risks. Retrieved
71 Analysis based on Global Food Security Index scores.