Resources

The Food Systems Dashboard brings together extant data from public and private sources to help decision makers understand their food systems, identify their levers of change and decide which ones need to be pulled.

Dramatic improvements in data availability and quality are needed to meet the challenge of monitoring and analyzing food systems, so that appropriate policies and actions to improve human and planetary health can be identified and data-informed accountability mechanisms put in place to strengthen food systems governance. Studying food systems is complex due to diverse actors and interlinking processes that operate on multiple spatial and temporal scales, and their multiple outcomes, which may be subject to hidden feedback mechanisms and tradeoffs. However, descriptive research to characterize food system components and make comparisons across geography, income groups, and population groups is an important foundation. The first part of this article details a series of critical data gaps and limitations that are currently hindering food systems learning and accountability, also comparing these gaps across regions and income groups. The second part of the article introduces the Food Systems Dashboard, a new data visualization tool that aims to improve access to and usage of food systems-related data, thus strengthening the data value chain and better informing policies and actions intended to improve diets, nutrition, livelihoods, and environmental sustainability.

Food systems have a profound impact on diets, nutrition, health, economic development, and environmental sustainability. Yet their complexity poses a persistent challenge in identifying the policy actions that are needed to improve human and planetary health outcomes. Typologies are a useful classification tool to identify similarities and differences among food systems, while reducing this analytical complexity. This study presents a new food system typology, implemented at the country level using parsimonious data that characterize food supply chains, food environments, consumer-related factors, and key outcomes, including dietary intake, nutritional status, health, and environmental impacts. Five food system types are identified: rural and traditional; informal and expanding; emerging and diversifying; modernizing and formalizing; and industrial and consolidated. Patterns across the five system types in key outcome variables align with narratives provided by the food systems and nutrition transition literature, demonstrating the usefulness of this classification method. Substantial heterogeneity nonetheless still exists within individual food system types. Therefore, the recommended use of the typology is in early stages of hypothesis generation, to identify potential risk factors or constraints in the food system that can be explored further at national and sub-national levels.

To reorient food systems to ensure they deliver healthy diets that protect against multiple forms of malnutrition and diet-related disease and safeguard the environment, ecosystems, and natural resources, there is a need for better governance and accountability. However, decision-makers are often in the dark on how to navigate their food systems to achieve these multiple outcomes. Even where there is sufficient data to describe various elements, drivers, and outcomes of food systems, there is a lack of tools to assess how food systems are performing. This paper presents a diagnostic methodology for 39 indicators representing food supply, food environments, nutrition outcomes, and environmental outcomes that offer cutoffs to assess performance of national food systems. For each indicator, thresholds are presented for unlikely, potential, or likely challenge areas. This information can be used to generate actions and decisions on where and how to intervene in food systems to improve human and planetary health. A global assessment and two country case studies—Greece and Tanzania—illustrate how the diagnostics could spur decision options available to countries.