Food System Country Profile - Better understanding food systems at country level
The Food System Country Profile offers a concise, visual, and evidence-based way to understand food systems at country level. It brings together critical information in a clear and accessible format, helping public and private decision-makers gain a holistic but manageable overview of the components that are essential to the sustainability of national food systems.
This profile brings together the following five key-components of food systems:
- Food system drivers
Those are the major factors known to influence directly the activities or the actors of the food systems. They include factors such as technological innovations, climate change, growing concerns about food safety, population growth or urbanization and changes in lifestyle.
- Food system actors and activities
This component includes five major types of activities and their actors: food production, storage and distribution, food processing and packaging, and retail and marketing.
- Food Environment
This refers to the different interacting processes that directly influence key characteristics of food, including their availability, quality, affordability or safety.
- Consumer behavior
What people choose to buy and eat does not depend only on the food environment. It also reflects people’s tastes and preferences, their socio-economic characteristics, such as income or education level, as well as their cultural identities (“who they are”).
- Food system outcomes
Food system outcomes can be grouped into four major categories: environmental, nutrition and health, economic, and social impacts. These outcomes are often shaped by trade-offs, meaning that not everything can always be maximized at the same time. Many key decisions made by policymakers need to account for these trade-offs to avoid unintended consequences.
What makes this process strong?
The strength of the Food System Country Profile process lies in its rigorous methodology, participatory approach, and bottom-up selection of indicators.
A rigorous methodology
The protocol includes:
- A set of 10 inclusion and exclusion criteria used to identify potential indicators for each of the five key components of the food system.
- A transparent methodology to select the subgroup of 30 indicators that will be retained in each country profile.
- A framework that is common to all countries, allowing for regional and global comparison and offering potential for inferential analyses.
A participatory process
From the first step, each country profile is designed and constructed with input from national stakeholders. This is a fundamental distinction from other initiatives that propose similar food system profiles but are designed behind closed doors by experts or academics, without input from stakeholders.
In this process, stakeholders provide feedback and validation at every step.
A bottom-up choice of indicators
The choice of indicators is completely bottom-up. This means that stakeholders are involved from the outset, and the process is designed to capture and include each country’s food system specificities and unique context.
In what context is this tool useful?
Country profiles are more than a simple compilation of national indicators. An important feature of the profiles is that they are co-produced with key public and private food system stakeholders, who help identify the data, validate results, and shape emerging key messages.
A conceptual framework guides the discussions between the project team and country stakeholders as they work together to select the most appropriate indicators for building the country food system profile.
This participatory process was structured into a clear and transparent 14-step protocol which provides one of the most rigorous and participatory, process available on food system overview – see details in the methodology document.
Results
These are the profiles that have been developed so far:
Publications
Research leaders
Christophe Béné
Principal Scientist - Senior Policy AdvisorFunders
This work was funded by the Swiss Federal Office for Agriculture (FOAG) as part of the “Sustainable Food System Country Profile” project. The ambition of this project was to design, field-test and communicate a tool that facilitates more informed and evidence-supported decisions around food systems and their sustainability. T The project sought a "middle ground" where the complexity, dynamics, and multi-sectoral nature of food systems were captured but boiled down to a manageable combination of key indicators that would not overwhelm policymakers but help them prioritize entry points for interventions. In each country, the project engaged multiple public and private partners - not just experts - from different components of the food systems, who participated in a whole ownership-building process (an example of that process here).