SEF Index

The Socio-Economic Index of Food Security (SEF)

The SEF Index aims to capture the economic dimension of food security. To this end, we overhauled and updated the index of socio-economic access to food developed in Seekell et al. 2017. As its predecessor, the revised index focuses on the global food system's ability to respond and adapt to disruptions. It is based on the ratio of two indicators: the average income of the lowest 20% of each country's income distribution (per capita) and average per capita food expenditure. These can be viewed as key indicators in forming an index that reflects the extent to which food is affordable by the least affluent segment of a population, and therefore can also serve as an indicator of resilience to short term spikes in food prices. Lower values suggest increasing trade-offs with other critical household expenditures (e.g. housing) and reduced ability to make-up caloric deficits through food purchases.

References

Seekell, D., Carr, J., Dell’Angelo, J., D’Odorico, P., Fader, M., Gephart, J., Kummu, M., Magliocca, N., Porkka, M., Puma, M., Ratajczak, Z., Rulli, M. C., Suweis, S., & Tavoni, A. (2017). Resilience in the global food system. Environmental Research Letters, 12(2), 025010. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aa5730